Happy last Friday of August!

Wowzers, August went quick (although, there's a decent chunk left next week, but this'll be the last Friday)! Also, for the eagle eyed of you, I've given up on clever email subjects and just gone with my blog's title: b:log. Lazy… perhaps. Genius marketing…possibly. Easier on my tiny mind: for sure.

Anyway…I've spent most of August quietly working on a new revision of JS Bin. To me, the current state of JS Bin is pretty hosed, and I've had my fair share of failings in the past (here's the 5 part series on the toxic side of free). In late July I started with a completely fresh codebase and have been building out the new version using React - which I'm still pretty new to.

Here's a sneak preview (though I've been tweeting pics too), and hopefully I'll be able to release it around September (this is the dark theme with the CSS panel, page output and console):

On the blog

I wrote about my experience with React, particularly as someone who isn't very "framework-freindly" and a bit of stickler for standards.

I also found a really nice accessibility feature tucked away inside of Chrome Canary that gives contrast information. It's probably my most liked tweet with over 1,000 likes so I wrote up how to enable it.

Monthly recommend

🔗 If you're interested in how things work…which, I kinda suspect if you work with the web, then you will be, I read a great post about how CSS hex colours work, not just what #FED means, but more interestingly why mixing red and green make yellow!

📚 I've always been a terribly slow reader of fiction books, but this year I've been trying to shut my laptop in the evenings and head to bed with a book. Just this week I started reading The Girl With All The Gifts which I'm really enjoying - definitely recommend it if you're looking for a read (and it's also been made into a film, so I'm planning on watching it once I've finished…or is that a bad idea!?).

I also asked Twitter and have had lot of (heavily sci-fi related) book recommendations if you're interested, and I've love to hear if you've got any particular favourite books - I'm always on the look out for suggestions.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

– Remy 👋