Happy last Friday of July!

Over here in the UK it's been a bit of a scorcher – which means that fellow gingers has been diving for cover. Where as for me, my freckles exploded and I (stupidly) burnt my shoulders on the first day of exposing my skin. Oh, and I had (friggin') tonsillitis – twice!!! in the space of 3 weeks 🤒

Projects

ffconf is probably the biggest (personal) event of my year, and I've been working hard with my partner Julie to make it amazing (and each year it's harder in a new way!). If you're in Europe, Brighton (where the event is held) is super accessible (…normally!) - you should definitely check it out (and if you want to send a team, drop me a reply to this email and I can offer a group discount).

ffconf 2018: webvr, web animations, machine learning, mentoring and more

Earlier this month we had a little family holiday (after a 2 year break from travelling with a toddler!), and coming back I've been off client work to focus on ffconf. As such, my mini-side project hacks have gone utterly over the top: I'm practically pushing new projects every day (which is great for learning, but is a little exhausting!).

Does it mutate? - I kept forgetting which JavaScript array methods would mutate, so I scraped some data from MDN via DuckDuckGo and put together a simple web site that I could hot link to methods: https://doesitmutate.xyz

A quick npm search - since npm's redesign, I couldn't get a quick list of all my npm projects (npms.io gets close, but it's a scroll-to-end loader - I wanted something quick). It's a single file page with "vanilla" source: https://npm.isthe.link/remy

JS object-type-thing to JSON - typically I'd convert a JS object to JSON by opening Chrome devtools, then doing something like `copy()` - but it wouldn't like comments and I wanted a "quicker" workflow, so I made this (again "vanilla" style): https://json.isthe.link

(Another friggin') Image Viewer - one of the first JS bases projected I wrote was an image gallery (using Windows Shell Scripting JScript and .HTA files…if you remember those). The reason I wrote it was to mirror to a ChromeCast, to support keyboard cursor and selecting images for download: https://viewer.isthe.link/ (I wrote this for myself so not sure about browser support)

And a bunch of other bits: cron.jobs (I'll write about this another day), README-first (puts github's readme first), nerve (a next.js and zeit serve combo server) and lately today I was hacking on Google Fit to import heart rates 😱😬

Sorry…that's rather a lot - but feel free to pinch any code from those projects.

Monthly recommend

📺 Cloak & Dagger (a google link) - I've been watching this on Amazon Prime and really enjoying it - and the music is pretty good too

💻 JSON5 - not a new thing, but I've been adding it to services I run to allow for "loose" JSON to be posted to my servers (like jsonbin.org)

🔗 Gyroscope - a quantified self web site. Very visually impressive, and now has Android support (along with iOS). It has an impressive number of integrations and tries to pull them all together to give you a full view of yourself. I've been playing with it a lot, I'm not 100% happy with it, but it's certainly interesting.

Sorry for all the links 😵 but I'll see you…digitally…next month!

– Remy 👋