Weeknotes 41

We went on a suprisingly smooth Sunday train ride to Chertsey today to meet some friends for a “mini Christmas” before we (hopefully) travel to Colombia for Christmas next weekend. The pub we chose met the criteria of being roughly equidistant from the three families, having more than one choice of veggie/vegan food and having a garden for the kids to play in. The log fire and Christmas tree was a nice bonus.

I spent the week remote mobbing with my GFR collegues. We had a short project with the Daylight Academy via a University of Oxford researcher we’ve worked with in the past. It was fun to build a client-side only prototype (in React). We deployed to Netlify which has a handy built-in bit of “serverless” code for doing the OAuth dance with Github. So we were able to build an app that lets users create Github repositories and add files to them all from a “static” site. Feels a bit like magic.

I shared some more of my music-making on Instagram this week. I rigged up a Heath Robinson wood-and-metal contraption to hold my digital camera so I could shoot overhead video. I find Instagram quite baffling and the constant ads, weird recommedations and Facebook ownership are quite unpleasant. But I’ve also had some really fun and helpful conversations about music on there too, which I think I’d lose if/when I go full IndieWeb.