Spring and Summer 2024 — Life, links and lmedia

I've had a pretty crazy 2024 so far — but to be honest I kinda say that all the time, maybe that's just my life? 😅

Anyway, wanted to do a wee summary of what I've been up to, blog posts I've written and read, and media!

Life

Work recently has been pretty busy. We've had a big new job come up that's a lot more technical and involved than most of our work, so that's taken a lot of attention. I've also been getting more into dev management — performance reviews, hiring practices, standards, etc.

I've also dedicated a lot of attention to selling My Top for Spotify, a project I built a few years ago. Check out my blog post "Selling a small front-end web project — what I learned" for more info on that. The short version is that it was exciting, new, and took a lot of my focus for about 6 weeks!

Personal life and hobbies have taken more of a backseat than I'd have liked.

• We've had friends come to stay a few times — I love hosting people;
• Saw Night Flight and The Japanese House — live
• Went to Edinburgh Pride;
• Did a few hillwalks — less than I'd like but it's tricky without a car;
• Sat on a mountain with some friends for hours watching the perseid meteor shower;
• Spent a few days visiting family in the Highlands;
• Had a good Edinburgh fringe with 5 shows, a couple great ones;
• Went to the south of France near Marseille for a week.

I launched my ko-fi page selling stickers and my art prints. The stickers have done well but the art prints less so. I'm not surprised, I haven't really pushed those much so need to do more.

I'm also regularly attending the Homebrew Website Club meetup in Edinburgh. It's a good small group and a great chance to casually chat and catch up about the web!

Last weekend I went to the State of the Browser conference down in London which is always fantastic. The talks were exceptional this year and I have great fun meeting up with and making new friends.

Posts from me

I've had a pretty good few months for blogging! What a great opportunity to encourage you to read and share those!

• Simple, fast build tooling with live reload for a non-framework website
• JS library compilation to browser, esm and cjs using esbuild
• Proxying an Image CDN with Cloudflare workers
• My response to UK CMA's potential remedies for mobile browser competition
• Selling a small front-end web project — what I learned
• My day at State of the Browser 2024

Posts from others I've enjoyed

I recently got back into RSS and reading blogs! I had 2500+ unread articles in my feed reader so declared RSS bankruptcy back in July, but have been keeping up since. It's been great to be reading more and I feel more creative, inspired, and excited about the web thanks to it!

Here are a list of some fantastic articles I've read since May, in order of when they were posted:

• Font with Built-In Syntax Highlighting — Glyph Drawing Club
• 12 Map Happenings that Rocked our World: Part 10 — James Killick
• Heydon Pickering's HTML element descriptions
• Partial Feature Queries, Relaxed Layout Containment, and More — Miriam Suzanne
• blocking=render: Why would you do that?! — Harry Roberts
• There are two kinds of advertising — Chris Coyier
• Cache Grab: How Much Are You Leaving on the Table? — Harry Roberts
• Some Git Tips — Evan Sheehan
• Day 109: the animation-composition property — Manuel Matuzović
• My first week in the CSS Working Group — Josh Tumath
• Can you convert a video to pure css? — David Gerrells
• Web Apps on iOS: is the CMA missing the point? — Bruce Lawson
• The secret inside One Million Checkboxes — Nolen Royalty
• Mountain Chicken! — Adrian Roselli
• Under-Engineered Estimated Reading Time Feature — Adrian Roselli
• The Dev Tools Performance Monitor Panel — Dave Rupert
• How to Monetize a Blog — modem.io
• Going Buildless — Max Böck
• The State of ES5 on the Web — Philip Walton
• What price? — Jeremy Keith
• Open Source Needs to be Financially Symbiotic — Zach Leatherman
• Good forms — Dave Rupert
• Limitation Breeds Creativity: A Study in Composition with Custom Properties — Michelle Barker
• Making Orbit Animations with CSS Custom Properties — Will Boyd
• Optimising for High Latency Environments — Harry Roberts

Media

I felt like I hadn't [read|watched|listened|played] as much media as I would've normally, but actually listing them out is quite a few! It didn't feel like much though!

Music

• Chappel Roan — The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
• HONNE — OUCH
• Cage the Elephant — Neon Pill
• Night Flight — English Noise
• Bleachers — Bleachers

Movies/TV/YouTube

• Challengers
• Jet Lag: The Game
• Om Shanti Om
• The Boy and the Heron
• Theater Camp
• Death in Paradise

Games

I also now track my games on Infinite Backlog if you're interested or on there! I also ranked every game I've ever played* and produced a top 100** which was good fun! Here's the recent ones:

• Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express
• Pentiment
• Nuts
• Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One
• LEGO Builder's Journey
• The Room
• Cultist Simulator — it's finally clicked after 6 years!
• One Night Burlesque

* at least as far as I remember
** not quite 100 but close enough!

Photos