Happy last Friday of March! And happy Brexit day…apparently…

Oh wow, the UK's political system is rather in a shambles right now! Never mind, there's chocolate eggs out in the supermarkets for 99p and spring has finally arrived 🎉

So ends Q1 and starts Q2 of 2019. Is there anything you're particularly proud of from Q1? I think for me, it'll be the WorldWideWeb CERN project.

All about the blog

During a quiet Saturday afternoon (my partner and kids were out on a day trip), I decided it would be "fun" to completely rewrite my blog from scratch taking large inspiration from 11ty. I did consider Hugo (and use it for the jsbin blog), and I've used Next.js (👈 that's 50% discounted link to my course) for a number of static site which I really like, and I dabbled with GatsbyJS - but being a tinkerer I saw drawn to writing something of my own.

With a few more hours stolen in the evenings, I successfully released the new software this morning with zero hiccups.

I'm going to write a few posts on the details, but here's some of the highlights:

  • Moved from a paid Heroku instance to a free Netlify account
  • Deploy process is faster
  • 300+mb of image links still work and are hosted as part of Netlify, whilst not impacting on the deploy time
  • I removed Twitter's tracking code whilst keeping the feature of "@rem has X number of followers"
  • Removed a dynamic server and still support it's functionality from the client
  • Removed jQuery as a client side dependency

I've been trying out a weekly Twitch sessions of 60 minutes, and this week I streamed the process of removing jQuery (not because I don't like jQuery, I still ❤️ it) which you can watch again on YouTube if you want.

My next plans with the blog are:

  • Remove disqus and replace with (something) like https://commento.io
  • Remove Google Analytics and replace with (again, something like) https://matomo.org
  • Investigae if there's a way I can get my drafts from dropbox to auto-deploy without having to push to github (not so sure about this)

The code is all in github too if you want a gander.

Monthly recommend

If you're a developer like me who knows good design, but can't produce it for love nor money, then you might like this. Sara Soueidan recommended it on Twitter: a (ready to go) design system for Sketch - with directions on how to customise: https://cabanadesignsystem.com (it's $48 which even for a small business like mine is a bargain).

Happy hacking!

My bits

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Thanks for reading and I'll speak to you again in April,

– Remy 👋

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