Happy last Friday of November! (AKA Happy buy-random-shit-on-the-web-friday)

Wow, was November a busy month! Julie (my partner) and I have rounded off ffconf for the 9th year (NINE YEARS?! 😱) a couple of weeks ago. Somehow it managed to be huge success again. I'm in the process of uploading videos to youtube (10s of GBs) and they'll be released on the @ffconf twitter account - the talks were a-maze-zing.

On the blog

When I started out attending conferences I'd always write up my experience, in fact, here's FOWA (if anyone remembers that) from 10 years ago! So this year, I wrote up my own experience of ffconf - but not from the organiser POV, but as an attendee (particularly as I get to see it twice): Thoughts and learning from ffconf

Following with my crazed obsession with 1980s computing and rebuilding ZX Spectrum toys, I've written up how to get binary values for numbers "properly", and if you want to see what this was all for, here's a sneak peek.

Visit the link above in a desktop browser (it won't work on a mobile phone), then type: enter, then J (it should read "LOAD " now), then in double quotes, your twitter handle, so it would read LOAD "rem" - then hit enter and put your volume around 30%!). It should…load your twitter avatar and dither it in 8 bit "attribute clash" styled graphics, and play the binary audio which is used to render the image on the screen. Let me know what you think! 😃

Monthly recommend

Given that it's Black Friday weekend, I thought I'd share a few deals I've come across:

  • NordVPN are offering a 3 year VPN for $99 - and their UX is really nice for both mobile and desktop
  • Alternatively, there's AirVPN which I've used for about 18 months, they're offering 1 year of VPN for €35
  • My own terminal.training video course is available at 30% off this weekend (ignore the countdown!)
  • For those developers who struggling with marketing (certainly I do), there's Marketing for Developers for $149 (not totally sure if that's for this weekend or not, but I bought this at full price about 9 months ago and definitely recommend it).

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend folks!

– Remy 👋