Happy last Friday of September - the birthday edition!

Humungs: 40!

As time seemingly speeds up, all of a sudden I was turning 40 (September 13 for those who want to send me cards next year!). It feels like my 30s zoomed on by rather quickly, partly the midsection when the kids turned up (by stalk of course).

Of course I blogged about it…I mean, my blog is an online journal so why not?

Then my son turns 7 tomorrow, which only increases the speed of which I age!!!

Though, I have a theory about how we experience time: it's all relative. When you're a child, you've only experienced a handful of years, so when you're 10, a full year feels like a long time because it's 10% of your life (because…it is). But when you're 40, 10% of your life is 4 years which more time passes for what feels like less. …I don't know, it makes sense in my head, and now you've got your dose of pseudo science for the morning!

JS Bin: 10!

A decade ago, I released a little project that let people make changes to code, and save the output as a live pastebin. In fact, JS Bin turned out to be the very first live pastebin. Today JS Bin hosts 45 million bins (last I counted) and has its fair share of bumps and knocks along the way!

If you want to lose some time, you can read the series of posts about the abuse the system has had that I wrote a few years ago: The toxic side of free. Or: how I lost the love for my side project

ffconf: 10!

This coming ffconf marks the 10th (yes, wow, tenth!) year. Between coding work, I've been chipping away at the event sadly lost Sarah Drasner's workshop (on Vue.js) and talk, but I've been rebuilding the speaker list and am really looking forward to the sessions I've curated.

A few of the highlights are:

  • Machine learning with JavaScript
  • Mentoring the next generation
  • Future of JavaScript: the next amazing proposals
  • WebXR - that's virtual reality and augmented reality combined, in the browser!

It's single track so there's no missing out and Julie (my partner) and I have been working for a year to make it another amazing year. You should join us and have something great to look forward to in November (Thursday and Friday are the same event, and Friday has only a couple of tickets left - yay).

I should come clean though, ffconf is running it's 10th event, but in "human years" that makes it 9. The upshot though: next year I get to say ffconf turns 10! 😋

Monthly recommend

Since this month's post seems to be dedicated to time progressing forward, it seems appropriate to mention that I've also been digging into my own past using various genealogy tools.

There's a tonne of web site dedicated to building family trees and research, so here's a few I've tried. I should note that I'm based in the UK where records are pretty good up to a certain point (I also note that there's a lot of US records too). I'm also half french which has proven a little trickier, but there are a few resources:

  • myheritage.com - this gives me the tree view, pedigree trees and research tools to help find individuals. I know that https://ancestry.com is a pretty good alternative and findmypast.co.uk (another UK focused site that looks great)
  • For census, birth, death and marriage records, I found https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk to be very good for UK (though it has some US data too)
  • For France I was using filae.com though it's probably the friendliest for searching, its dataset is far from complete (I found online scans from the department websites that had more data, just not transcribed).

But trying to read this document (picture) was probably the highlight!

Until next month,

– Remy 👋