Tomomi Imura

Tomomi Imura

An Open Web advocate and front-end engineer, who loves everything mobile, and writes about HTML5, CSS, JS, UX, tech events, gadgets, etc. She unintentionally got 15min of fame by creating The HTTP Status Cats. Also, the opinions expressed here are solely her own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Github Flickr

Creative Commons License
My articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

About GirlieMac

Hello, this is Tomomi, a.k.a @girlie_mac, sometimes without the underscore, such as girliemac at where don’t allow the special characters. To be honest, I totally regret that I gave myself such a silly handle name, especially because it is quite embarrassing to call myself girlie at my age.

Earlier Days

I started using this handle name when I launched the original website, “Tomomi’s Girlie Macintosh!” in 1996. Later, I shortened the name to “GirlieMac!” with the domain name in the early 2000s. The initial purpose of the website was to distribute cutesy icons I created and my original Kaleidoscope schemes to customize MacOS interface. It was fun to involve awesome Mac communities at that time. I remember that we, Mac community members, tried to support then-dying Apple by buying some AAPL stocks. I paid $25/share. It was before, or around Steve’s comeback.

Around the time I was studying at grad school, got a job, lost the job etc, GirlieMac! went into dormant state sometimes between 2002 - 2007.

Mid 2000s

By the time I decided to revive this site, Apple was no longer a dying company. I sold my AAPL stocks at $50 in 2005 (OMG), and moved to San Francisco Bay Area. Coincidentally enough, the first company who has contacted me for a job interview was Apple.

However, I chose to work at a design firm in San Francisco for the easier commute. I have no idea what I was thinking.

My Mobile Days

To make a long story short, I was working at various companies in the mobile industry from late 2005 to 2014. And in 2007, Apple’s iPhone release made me decide to revive GirlieMac! with iPhone related blog posts on WordPress.

Eventually my blog has become more of general web technology blog rather than Apple-related, as my career as a web developer had matured.

In the end of 2013, I got sick of writing HTML of tech articles, I decided to set up Jekyll on my Github and start writing articles in markdown.

As a Front-end Developer and Beyond

My content has changes as my career changes- for a while, my focus was web development, web standards, and HTML5, as I was working with W3C. Later, expanded my topics with Node.js and more.

After 2012, I have shifted my job from engineering to Developer Relations. Especially after 2014, I started writing a lot of tutorials and other technical content for my job, and also writing for the external media. This is why I am not writing for my own website as frequently. Oopsie.