# 23: Remy's b:log
Happy last Friday of April!
How was your April? Egg laden like mine? We've literally stashed chocolate in hiding places to prevent the adults from consuming more!
I feel like although I've been extremely busy with a client project, somehow my blogging and side-project-coding and twitching have been doing pretty well.
On the blog
For the last few years I've set myself the aim of two posts per month on my blog. This month I managed five 🎉
My son and I have been playing with Scratch (my daughter is still a little too young) and after making some simple things, the coding escalated to putting him in the Scratch program (after which he starts to attack a knight in armour!). Amazingly simple with the help of the remove dot bg web app: read all about it
My client work is heavily focused in React these days, and I accidentally stumbled upon an anti-pattern around clickable elements. Part one is ensuring that anything with an onClick also has a URL, but part two is ensuring the browser's native ability to open in new windows: read how I failed the anchor
As part of my refactoring my blog from a Heroku hosted site to a fully static site on Netlify, I questioned the real cost of syntax highlighting and whether it should be on the client or server.
Then as part of an ongoing audit to contribute less to the "leaky boat of today's privacy". To wit I discover (using DuckDuckGo's browser extension) that Twitter was able to track my visitors because I had a "follow me" button. So I completely removed their user tracking whilst keeping the following count.
Monthly recommend
On the trend of privacy and trying to leave less of a digital footprint that's trackable and makes me less susceptible to manipulation, I've been collecting sites that offer alternatives to the big sites like Google.
Two great sites that collect these are:
To close off, I never realised that VS Code has telemetry that's heading off to Microsoft. So here's a fork of VS Code that's free of tracking (you can also disable the telemetry in regular VS Code, but I'm not sure what else is lurking in there).
My bits
I've got a few ways that you can support my writing, code and work.
- Learn from my courses: Learn the Command Line and Mastering universal React with Next.js (both available with a 50% discount using "SUBSCRIBER")
- Software: jqterm for Mac - a desktop copy of jqterm.com (which I personally use on a weekly basis) - pick your own price starting at €5 (I use this tool on a near-daily basis)
Thanks for reading and I'll speak to you again in May,
– Remy 👋