A Scrollytelling Gift for Mum on Mother’s Day 2026

My mum loved logic because she was born at a time when nothing made sense. She was born in 1945, the year World War II ended, so she dodged a literal bullet because we are Jewish. But from the first day of her life, she found that famine, racism, and misfortune kept trying to take her away. In 2011, cancer took her away from me forever. But on a lighter note, this Mother’s Day I’m bringing her back to life the only way I know how: UI mad science! I will explain how my mum inspired this 2026 Mother’s Day scrollytelling experiment — but also, how she inspired my approach to dev and life. Along the way, I’ll discuss some of the tech involved in this virtual Mother’s Day gift. I normally write either inspirational or technical posts — but for Mother’s Day, you’re getting a twofer. Try the interactive Mother’s Day card Here’s the CodePen, which uses scroll-snap events and scroll-state queries , so it will only work in Chromium-based browsers at the moment. CodePen Embed Fallback Alternatively, here’s a video demo with commentary by my eight-year-old. It was bittersweet to realise that this is the closest he has come to interacting with his nana, because she passed before he was born. Why I made this Mum was born in a hospital in Kazakhstan, where civilian patients shared wards with discharged soldiers suffering PTSD. They wandered in and out of the maternity rooms, terrifying the patients and making labour even harder for my grandmother. When Mum was born, she wasn’t breathing. The staff immersed her in cold water, then hot, then cold water again — a so-called remedy at the time based on no science . This was the beginning of a larger pattern in her life: She kept surviving not because of the help she received, but despite chaos disguised as help. So, as an adult, Mum learned to survive by finding patterns and sense in the unfathomable. She accomplished this by combining her three passions: In photography, she framed moments when the chaos of her surroundings temporarily