Happy last Friday of October 🎃

I write to you from a car moving through very thick traffic on the M25. Thankfully I'm not driving, but I can tell you that I've got motion sickness at level 9 right now, and this newsletter might be decorated with some 🤢🤮…!

Annnnyway. This last month feels like the conference scene has exploded. There's definitely a quiet period during August / school holidays, but now it's exploded again.

Just today, I see that Mozilla's View Source Conf and React Conf.

I've been announcing the speakers for ffconf over the last few weeks, and my conference is in less than 2 week sad I'm pretty excited!

  • The Future of JavaScript & Machine Learning - Eleanor Haproff
  • Mentoring: Being the help you wish you'd had - Jo Franchetti
  • Practical Web Animation - Lisi Linhart
  • Is it possible to build a truly diverse community? - Jenny Wong
  • Back to the future of JS: the next features and amazing proposals - Willian Martins
  • WebXR: A New Dimension For The Web - Michaela Lehr
  • Dear Developer, the Web Isn't About You - announced next week!
  • Weird Web & Curious Creation - announced next week!

You can still buy a Thursday ticket Friday is sold out.

Reacty Stuff

I caught some of the React Conf talks on YouTube* yesterday and the announcement of react@16.7.0-alpha.0 that proposes a new set of APIs referred to as hooks which I think look really interesting moving closer to a really clean and encapsulated component workflow.

* When I tried the YouTube stream from the car, tethered, it wouldn't load due to licence rights - so your milage may vary.

Dan Abramov's twitter timeline is also good source for more info.

Tinkering: with Electron

In the last few months I've been itching various desires for a couple of desktop apps using Electron. On one hand I like that barrier to entry is reasonable low to building an app, the downside is the silly final file size (a menu app consisting of a menu and two screens is around 120mb!).

I've written two apps, one for "digital wellness" and another for jq (if you've followed my newsletters, you'll know I'm a fan!).

On of these is End of Days aims to kick me away from my machine before it gets too late. It completely takes over the screen at the given time (10:30pm in this case), and the only way to remove the blocker is to enter the Konami code (though I'm thinking of randomising the key sequence to make it harder):

If you'd like to try it out, just reply to this email and I can send you a copy - I'd really appreciate any feedback.

Maybe a little early to really say, but I got myself a Google Hub. I think I'd describe it as a "smart picture frame". Set up was incredibly simple, and because I use Google for my photos, it took next to nothing to get pictures of the kids and the pets on the screen.

One thing I am impressed with is how dark the screen can go, which is important to me that it's not lighting up the bedroom during the night.

It does music too, but the speakers are really quite tinny, which is fine for morning radio, but not so good for rocking out in a kitchen with the kids.

I did also fork out for a Pixel 3 XL which arrives next week which I'm pretty excited about (I love my Pixel 1 and the camera is amazing)…but that was a little more of a financial outlay! That said, if you're thinking about the Pixel, I'd be happy to answer any questions about it - just reply to this email.

Until next month,

– Remy 👋