Happy last Friday of November,

And oh my gosh it's December already 😱 (well, tomorrow). November is probably the most work heavy/intense month for me - and that's entirely down to ffconf 2018 - which was a blast!

My big thing: ffconf v10

The 10th version was quite stressful and had some very new elements for me to deal with. The biggest is that one of our speakers had to step down at the last minute (the week before), so I stepped in to replace the speaker. It's never my intention to speak at the event, but given that this was the 10th, my speaking made it a little more special for me too.

I wrote up my own experience of the event and how it's grown over the last 10 events, and how the event is tied so inexplicably to my family.

The videos are being published online (I'm halfway through releasing them) if you want to take a look: ffconf youtube playlist

Just a couple of the take aways I got from the (two) days (in no particular order):

  • Quokka.js is superb for rapid hacking in VS Code
  • CSS variables and the Web Animation API mix really well together
  • If you want to play at generative art, start super-super simply, like: draw a line, then repeat it…
  • Keep asking myself: "is what I'm doing inclusive"

In the end though, the event is about the people, and each year I'm reminded that the core of ffconf and the core of the web is people.

Form the blog

If you like your terminal hacking as much as I do, then these two posts might be of interest:

I have manage to keep up a two-posts-a-month cadence on my blog, but there's loads I want to write about and an ever growing list of drafts that don't get finished. In December in 2016 I decided to do 24 posts - which was hard (though it meant I cleared a lot of my drafts), but it might be fun challenge to run again… 🤔 What do you think?

Monthly recommend

This game has been around for quite a long time (it would seem), but I found it recently and I am addicted. I've switched to it to kill a few minutes and distract myself from a work problem, and I've equally lost multiple hours on a single level/problem:

▷ https://alf.nu/ReturnTrue

The aim is to return true in as few characters as possible. This level is definitely my favourite because I spent a tonne of time learning the tech that answers this question and my 17 character answer is one of the shortest 😃 (you need to progress some levels before you can jump to it)

Until next month,

– Remy 👋