Happy last Friday Saturday of October.

A fun and interesting month sits behind me at the end of October. The house move that I mentioned last month was the biggest thing. We were without broadband (and I work from home mostly) so we were living off MiFis and payg SIM cards - which we managed to chomp through 40gb in about 3 weeks.

We had a new boiler installed because the original was straight from 1979 whilst I was swanning off for conferences in Amsterdam (for Fronteers) and New York (for Smashing Cons) whilst also doing client work, and then, and then we're in the final throws of organising ffconf 2019! Busy, busy, busy.

On the blog & online

How we built the World Wide Web in five days

This month's main release has to be the talk I gave with Jeremy Keith earlier this month at Fronteers.

The planning process was really interesting and one of the most important aspects to me personally is that it didn't suck. I've seen a lot of two-person talks and nearly all of them have been painful to watch.

Jeremy also wrote up some of the process and his experience of the talk, and you watch the talk here.

As Jeremy said:

This talk could have easily turned into a boring slideshow of “what we did on our holidays”, but I think we managed to successfully avoid that trap. We’re both proud of this talk and we’d love to give it again some time. If you’d like it at your event, get in touch.

Blog posts

I've got a number of drafts on the go at the moment, and I think I'll be publishing again before the month it out, but there's just two published this month (the minimum I set myself a couple of years ago). Both, hopefully, helpful to web developers:

The other big thing

Next month, in fact just shy of 2 weeks, is our eleventh ffconf. All the speakers are live and all the day passes have sold. You can still join my Next.js 9.1.x workshop (which includes a conference pass).

The event is filmed and will be freely released in the month following (editing and uploading is a single person process, so understandable isn't instant).

You'll find this all online at the archive: ffconf.org

I'm really looking to the day and the content ::squee:: (I'd recommend running an event if it didn't also include 6 months of stressing and a solid month of stressed based dreams where speakers forget to turn up and only 15 attendees arrive!!!)

Monthly recommend

Firstly, it was the w3c's 25 birthday this October, and they encourage you post your own #webstory - so that's my first recommend this month. Publish your own story of how you connected with the web. Every story is unique and so interesting. If you do publish, please ping me a reply with your post, I'd love to read it (I'm hoping to have mine finished next week).

Secondly, I've been using Karabiner which is a macOS based keyboard mapping software (sorry Windows and Linux users). Since I've bought a new mechanical keyboard, I've found I needed to customise my keys a little more than usual and although the UI isn't super intuitive, the configuration features are extensive. One simple change I've made is to map cap-locks to ` (backtick) - that alone is a massive help. Definitely check it out.

Thanks for reading and I shall return in November.

– Remy 👋

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