Happy last Friday of August.

August, for me, as it will always be, is a hard month. I wrote about how our first born daughter would have had her ninth birthday, but doesn't and never will (cw: stillbirth). To top off the emotional lows, one of our cats died at the end of July, we found him in in the garden, he was 14.

My partner and I have taken this week off work and I've tried mostly to keep offline just to give ourselves a little head space. It's good. It's lonely. But for me, it reminds me that it's the people around us that make life real.

On the blog

Aside from my two personal posts on Tia's not-ninth and Ninja passing away I had a bit of (another) spurt of technical posts.

  • Predictably Random - wherein I talk about seeding random numbers, and reddit commenter's decide to call me amateurish (I liked the ish bit 😁)
  • An fd trick - fd is a really useful command line tool (an alternative to find) and in this post I use it to do a mass git rename process.
  • Build free code & testing ES module imports - I talk about how I'm (finally) able to use ES module import statements without any build tools in my node based projects both in my code and in my tests.

I also released an update to my blog so that it now works offline, and I'll be writing up a few tricks I'm using, my favourite of which is the offline-recently-visited page:

Offline

Monthly recommend

Another book. In the last few months I've been reading the news 😭 plus my own sad news, and then reading The Three-Bodied Problem (and it's sequel) and then watching Years and Years (excellent, on BBC iPlayer) so my current view on everything was super super bleak.

I asked for a recommendation that was: "Fiction, light hearted, fun, lovely. i.e. Antithesis of brexit/current twitter/years & years"

One such recommendation was Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Oh, my, gosh: it was perfect. It's absolutely 100% happy. I literally smiled all throughout reading this book.

So if you want a book that's happy and a total break to the bleak outlook of the current social and political climate then I highly recommend this book.

Thanks for reading and I shall return in September.

– Remy 👋

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