Journal tags: brighton

When I was hosting the DIBI conference in Edinburgh back in May, I moderated an impromptu panel on AI:

On the whole, it stayed quite grounded and mercifully free of hyperbole. Both speakers were treating the current crop of technologies as tools. Everyone agreed we were on the hype cycle, probably the peak of inflated expectations, looking forward to reaching the plateau of productivity.

Something else that happened at that event was that I met Deborah Dawton from the Design Business Association. She must’ve liked the cut of my jib because she invited me to come and speak at their get-together in Brighton on the topic of “AI, Web3 and design.”

The representative from the DBA who contacted me knew what they were letting themselves in for. They wrote:

I’ve read a few of your posts on the subject and it would be great if you could join us to share your perspectives.

How could I say no?

I’ve published a transcript of the short talk I gave.

I spent Friday morning in band practice with Salter Cane. It was productive. We’ve got some new songs that are coming together nicely. We’re still short a drummer though, so if you know anyone in Brighton who might be interested, let me know.

As we were packing up, we could here the band next door. They were really good. Just the kind of alt-country rock that would go nicely with Salter Cane.

On the way out, Jessica asked at the front desk who that band was. They’re called The Roebucks.

When I got home I Ducked, Ducked and Went to find out more information. There’s a Bandcamp page with one song. Good stuff. I also found their Facebook page. That’s where I saw this little tidbit:

Hello, we are supporting @seapowerband at @chalk_venue on the 30th of October. Hope you can make it!

Wait, that’s this very weekend! And I love Sea Power (formerly British Sea Power—they changed their name, which was a move that only annoyed the very people who’s worldviews prompted the name change in the first place). How did I not know about this gig? And how are there tickets still available?

And that’s how I came to spend my Sunday evening rocking out to two great bands.

dConstruct 2022 was great fun. It was also the last ever dConstruct.

If you were there, and you’d like to re-live the magic, the audio from the talks is now available on the dConstruct Archive. Here they are:

• George Oates
• Lauren Beukes
• Daniel Burka
• Sarah Angliss
• Matt Webb
• Seb Lee-Delisle
• Anil Seth

Thanks to some service worker magic, you can select any of those talks for offline listening later.

The audio is also available on Huffduffer on the dConstruct Huffduffer account. Here’s the RSS feed that you can pop into your podcast software of choice.

If you’re more of a visual person, you can watch videos of the slides synced with the audio. They’ve all got captions too (good ones, not just automatically generated).

So have a listen in whichever way you prefer.

Now that I’ve added the audio from the last dConstruct to the dConstruct archive, it feels like the closing scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Roll credits.

dConstruct 2022 happened last Friday, September 9th.

And what an event it was! All eight talks were superb. To have eight speakers and not a single dud is pretty great. To have eight speakers and each one be absolutely brilliant is more than I could’ve hoped for.

Hidde has written a summary of the talks. I loved each and every one. I got to sit there in the front row of the beautiful Duke of York’s cinema and watch these supersmart people blow my mind.

With six of the eight speakers having spoken at previous dConstructs, there was a lot of nostalgia in the air on Friday.

It was the last dConstruct.

A lot of people seemed surprised by this even though I kept saying it was a one-off event. Really, the last dConstruct happened in 2015. This year’s event was a one-time-only anniversary event.

Obviously because the day was so great, people expressed sadness and disappointment that there wouldn’t be another. But like I said, if a band like The Velvet Underground reforms to do one last gig, that’s pretty cool; but if a band like The Velvet Underground reforms to go on endless tours, that’s kind of sad. It’s time to move on. Have one last blow-out and go out in style.

And who knows? Maybe there’ll be some other kind of dConstructy gathering in a different format. Perhaps an evening salon event is more suited to this kind of interdisciplinary mish-mash. But as a one-day conference, dConstruct is now officially over.

To be honest, there was never any doubt that dConstruct 2022 would be an excellent day of talks. I knew that each of the speakers would deliver the goods. I played it somewhat safe with the line-up. Because this was a kind of “best of” event, I could draw upon speakers from previous years who were guaranteed to be mesmerising.

In a weird way, that also highlights the biggest problem with this year’s dConstruct. Even though every individual talk was terrific, when you pull back and look at the line-up in aggregate, you can’t help but notice its lack of diversity.

That’s on me.

I could show you the list of people I tried to get. I could talk you through the spots that fell through. But all I’d be doing is giving you excuses. I could show that my intentions were good, but intentions don’t matter as much as actions. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and what we ate last Friday was wonderful but also sadly representative of dConstruct’s homogenous history. For that reason alone, it’s time to draw a line under dConstruct.

It was a bittersweet send-off. On the one hand, I got to enjoy a day of brilliant talks. On the other hand, I’m pretty disappointed in myself that the line-up wasn’t more diverse. I can make all the claims I want about valuing diversity, but they’re hollow without meaningful results.

So that’s enough looking to the past. I’m bidding farewell to dConstruct and setting my sights on the future, a future that features more and different voices.

If you came along to dConstruct 2022, thank you! If you enjoyed attending dConstruct just half as much as I enjoyed hosting it …well, then I enjoyed it twice as much as you.

I’m taking a nice long weekend break after dConstruct on Friday (I will of course have more to say on that—I’m collecting my thoughts still—but it was a wonderful day).

On Saturday I did absolutely nothing. It was just as well really, considering that I may have over-indulged in the pub on Friday evening after dConstruct was done. So a day of lounging around idly playing mandolin was just the ticket.

Yesterday, Sunday, I had one of those perfect leisurely days.

It began with a good bout of lazing about in the morning. Then, as lunchtime approached, Jessica and I went to a nearby pub for a Sunday Roast. In this case it was the Dover Castle. It turned out to be an excellent choice—top notch roasts!

While we were enjoying our lunch, Jessica spotted a poster on the wall for Bark In The Park, a local fun day of dog-centred activities. We were sure it had already happened earlier in Summer, but the poster said it was rescheduled to …yesterday!

So after lunch we went to the park and spent the next few hours in the sunshine, petting very good dogs and enjoying the spectacle of such catgories as “fancy dress”, “best rescue”, and “sausage catching.” We left shortly before the announcement of “best in show”—my money was on Mayhem—so I could nip home, grab my mandolin, and head to The Bugle pub for the weekly 4pm Irish music session.

After two hours of jigs’n’reels, I headed home. The weather was still lovely. The forecast was for cloudy weather, but it was unexpectedly sunny. So I fired up the outdoor grill.

We grilled: one aubergine, halved and scored; one yellow courgette, halved; one green courgette, halved; half a hispe cabbage, quartered. Once they were nicely charred outside and soft within, we ate them with a drizzle of tahini sauce, accompanied by a green salad.

By that time the sun had gone down and it was time for a nice evening spent watching the latest episode of The Rings Of Power and drinking a nice cup of tea.

Like I said, a perfect leisurely day.

Just one more sleep until dConstruct—squee!

Not that I anticipate getting much sleep. My sleepnessness will partly be like that of a child on the night before Christmas. But my sleepnessness will also inevitably be that of an adult neurotically worrying about trifling details.

In reality, everything is all set. Thanks to the stellar Clearleft events team, I don’t need to lose any sleep. But my stupid brain can’t help but run a conveyer belt of potential problems through my mind: what about dongles? Power? Timings? What if there’s an impromptu rail strike? A deluge? Other emergencies you can’t even imagine?

I try to ignore those pestering pointless questions and instead think about the fantastic talks we’re going to get. I’m genuinely excited about each and every speaker. I’m pretty sure that once the day begins, I’ll forget all my worries and bliss out to the mind-expanding presentations.

The day before a conference feels kind of like the build-up to a battle. All the strategic decisions have been made, everything is in place, and now there’s nothing to do but wait.

I’ve communicated (or maybe over-communicated) all the relevant details to the speakers. And one week ago I sent one final email to the attendees with details of the schedule and some suggestions for lunch.

I also included this request:

Could you do me a favour? Would you mind getting a hold of a Covid test sometime in the next week and taking a test a day or two before dConstruct? (And if you test positive, please don’t come to the event.)

If you can’t get hold of a test (I know it can be tricky), then could you please bring a mask to wear when inside the venue?

I think asking everyone to take a test is a reasonable request, and nobody has objected to it. I worry that it’s yet another form of hygiene theatre (like providing anti-bacterial handwash for an airborne virus). After all, the antigen tests are most effective when you’ve already got symptoms. Taking a test when you don’t have symptoms might well give a negative result, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have Covid. Still, it’s a little intervention that might catch an infection that otherwise would’ve spread further.

I’m assuming that everyone coming to dConstruct is vaccinated. Maybe that’s naive on my part, but I figure if you’re intelligent enough to get a dConstruct ticket, you’re intelligent enough to protect yourself and others. So we won’t be requesting proof of vaccination. I hope my naivety aligns with reality.

See, this is all one more thing for my brain to gnaw on when I should be thinking about what a fantastic day of talks I’ve got ahead of me. Roll on tomorrow!

Not long now until the last ever dConstruct. It’s on Friday of next week, that’s the 9th of September. And there are still a few tickets available if you haven’t got yours yet.

I have got one update to the line-up to report. Sadly, Léonie Watson isn’t going to be able to make it after all. That’s a shame.

But that means there’s room to squeeze in one more brilliant speaker from the vaults of the dConstruct archive.

I’m very pleased to announce that Seb Lee-Delisle will be returning, ten years after his first dConstruct appearance.

Back then he was entertaining us with hardware hacking and programming for fun. That was before he discovered lasers. Now he’s gone laser mad.

Don’t worry though. He’s fully qualified to operate lasers so he’s not going to take anyone’s eye out at dConstruct. Probably.

The last ever dConstruct will happen just over three weeks from now, on Friday, September 9th.

That’s right—if you don’t have your ticket for this event, you won’t get another chance. The conference with its eye on the future will become a thing of the past.

dConstruct is going to go out with a bang, a veritable fireworks display of mind bombs. A calligrapher, a writer, a musician, and a nueroscientist will be on the line-up alongside designers and technologists.

Here’s the schedule for the day:

8:30	Registration begins
9:50	Opening remarks
10:00	George Oates
10:30	Lauren Beukes
11:00	Break
11:30	Seb Lester
12:00	Daniel Burka
12:30	Lunch
14:00	Sarah Angliss
14:30	Matt Webb
15:00	Break
15:30	Léonie Watson
16:00	Anil Seth
16:30	Closing remarks

So the first talk starts at 10am and the last talk finishes at 4:30pm—all very civilised. Then we can all go to the pub.

There isn’t an official after-party but we can collectively nominate a nearby watering hole—the Unbarred taproom perhaps, or maybe The Hare And Hounds or The Joker—they’re all within cat-swinging distance of The Duke Of York’s.

Lunch isn’t provided but there are some excellent options nearby (and you’ll have a good hour and a half for the lunch break so there’s no rush).

The aforementioned Joker has superb hot wings from Lost Boys Chicken (I recommed the Rufio sauce if you like ‘em spicy, otherwise Thuddbutt is a good all ‘rounder).

The nearby Open Market has some excellent food options, including Casa Azul for superb Mexican food, and Kouzina for hearty Greek fare.

And the famous Bardsley’s fish’n’chips is just ‘round the corner too.

So there’ll be plenty of food for the soul to match the food for your brain that’ll be doled up at dConstruct 2022.

Alright, I’ve kept you in suspense for long enough. It’s time to reveal the magnificent line-up for dConstruct 2022.

I’ll now put names to the teasing list of descriptions I previously provided…

A technologist, product designer, and writer who defies categorisation. They’ve headed up a design studio, co-founded a start-up, and now consult on super-clever machine learning stuff. Their blog is brilliant.

This is Matt Webb. Matt previously spoke at dConstruct back in 2007, when he gave a talk called The Experience Stack

An award-winning author from South Africa whose work has recently been adapted for television. Some of their work is kind of sci-fi, some of it is kind of horror, some of it is kind of magical realism, and all of it is great.

This is Lauren Beukes. Lauren previously spoke at dConstruct in 2012, when she gave a talk called Imagined Futures.

An artist and designer who has created logos and illustrations for NASA, Apple, and Intel as well as custom typefaces for British Airways and Waitrose. A lover of letterforms, they are now one of the world’s highest-profile calligraphers posting their mesmerising work on Instagram.

This is Seb Lester.

A Canadian digital designer who has previously worked in the agency world, at Silicon Valley startups, and even venture capital. But now they’re doing truly meaningful work, designing for busy healthcare workers in low-income countries.

This is Daniel Burka. Daniel previously spoke at dConstruct back in 2008, when he gave a talk called Designing for Interaction.

A multi-instrumentalist musician, producer and robotic artist who composes for film, theatre and the concert stage. They play a mean theremin.

This is Sarah Angliss. Sarah previously spoke at dConstruct in 2013, when she gave a talk called Tech and the Uncanny.

An Australian designer and entrepreneur. They work in the cultural heritage sector and they’re an expert on digital archives. Their latest challenge is working out how to make an online photography archive last for 100 years.

This is George Oates. George previously spoke at dConstruct back in 2007, where she and Denise Wilton had a conversation called Human Traffic.

A tireless defender of web standards and co-author of the Inclusive Design Principles. They’re a member of the W3C Advisory Board and of the BIMA Inclusive Design Council. Expect some thoughtful takes on the intersection of accessibility and emerging technologies.

This is Léonie Watson.

A professor of neuroscience who is also a bestselling author. They conduct experiments on people’s brains and then talk about it afterwards. Their talks have been known to be mind-altering.

This is Anil Seth.

That’s quite a line-up, isn’t it?

Deducing the full line-up just from those descriptions wasn’t easy, but Hidde de Vries managed it. So Hidde gets a free ticket to dConstruct 2022 …or, at least, he would if it weren’t for the fact that he already has a ticket (because Hidde is smart; be like Hidde). So a friend of Hidde’s is getting a free ticket instead (because Hidde is generous; be like Hidde).

If you’ve been putting off getting a ticket for dConstruct 2022 until you knew what the line-up would be, well, put off no longer.

You’ll want to be at the Duke of York’s in Brighton on Friday, September 9th. With this line-up of eight supersmart speakers, you know it’s going to be a fantastic day!

The line-up for dConstruct 2022 is complete!

If you haven’t yet got your ticket, it’s not too late.

Now here’s the thing…

When I announced the event back in May, I said:

I’m currently putting the line-up together. I’m not revealing anything just yet, but trust me, you will want to be there.

I still haven’t revealed anything, and I’m kind of tempted to keep it that way. Imagine showing up at an event and not knowing who’s going to be speaking. Is this is the best idea or the worst idea?

I suspect I’m going to have to announce the line-up at some point, but today is not that day. I’m going to string it out a bit longer.

But I am going to describe the line-up. And I’m going to throw in a challenge. The first person to figure out the complete line-up gets a free ticket. Send a tweet to the @dConstruct Twitter account with your deductions.

Ready? Here’s who’s speaking at dConstruct 2022 on Friday, September 9th in The Duke Of Yorks in Brighton…

1. A technologist, product designer, and writer who defies categorisation. They’ve headed up a design studio, co-founded a start-up, and now consult on super-clever machine learning stuff. Their blog is brilliant.
2. An award-winning author from South Africa whose work has recently been adapted for television. Some of their work is kind of sci-fi, some of it is kind of horror, some of it is kind of magical realism, and all of it is great.
3. An artist and designer who has created logos and illustrations for NASA, Apple, and Intel as well as custom typefaces for British Airways and Waitrose. A lover of letterforms, they are now one of the world’s highest-profile calligraphers posting their mesmerising work on Instagram.
4. A Canadian digital designer who has previously worked in the agency world, at Silicon Valley startups, and even venture capital. But now they’re doing truly meaningful work, designing for busy healthcare workers in low-income countries.
5. A multi-instrumentalist musician, producer and robotic artist who composes for film, theatre and the concert stage. They play a mean theremin.
6. An Australian designer and entrepreneur. They work in the cultural heritage sector and they’re an expert on digital archives. Their latest challenge is working out how to make an online photography archive last for 100 years.
7. A tireless defender of web standards and co-author of the Inclusive Design Principles. They’re a member of the W3C Advisory Board and of the BIMA Inclusive Design Council. Expect some thoughtful takes on the intersection of accessibility and emerging technologies.
8. A professor of neuroscience who is also a bestselling author. They conduct experiments on people’s brains and then talk about it afterwards. Their talks have been known to be mind-altering.

Sounds pretty freaking great, right?

Some further clues…

Many of these people have spoken at dConstruct in the past. After all, this year’s one-off event is going to be a kind of “best of.” So you might want to have a nose around the dConstruct archive.

Also, I’ve mentioned some nationalities like Australian, Canadian, and South African, but my self-imposed carbon footprint policy for this event forbids me from flying anyone in. So that’s a clue too.

The game is afoot! Tweet your deductions to the @dConstruct Twitter account or, even better, write a blog post and tweet the link, mentioning @dConstruct. The first correct answer gets a free ticket.

For everyone else, you can still get a ticket.

dConstruct is back!

No, really, for real this time.

We had plans to do a one-off dConstruct anniversary event in 2020. It would’ve been five years since the event ran its ten year course from 2005 to 2015.

We all know what happened next. Not only was there no dConstruct in 2020, there were no live events at all. So we postponed the event. 2021 was slightly better than 2020 for live events, but still not safe enough for us.

Now, finally, the fifteenth anniversary edition of dConstruct is happening, um, on the seventeeth anniversary of dConstruct.

It’s all very confusing, I know. But this is the important bit:

dConstruct 2022 is happening on Friday, September 9th in the Duke of York’s picture house in Brighton.

Tickets are available now.

Or, at least some tickets are available now. Quite a lot of eager folks bought tickets when the 2020 event was announced and those tickets are still good for this 2022 event …which is the 2020 event, but postponed by two years.

I’m currently putting the line-up together. I’m not revealing anything just yet, but trust me, you will want to be there.

If you haven’t been to a dConstruct event before, it’s kind of hard to describe. It’s not a practical hands-on conference where you learn design or development skills. It’s brain food. It’s about technology, culutre, design, society, the future …well, like I said, it’s kind of hard to describe. Have a poke around the dConstruct archive and listen to the audio from previous talks to get some idea of what might be in store.

dConstruct 2022 is a one-off event. I wouldn’t want you to regret missing out, so grab your ticket now.

There was a week recently where I was out and about nearly every night.

One night, Jessica and I went to the cinema. There was a double bill of Alien and Aliens in the beautiful Duke of York’s picture house. We booked one of the comfy sofas on the balcony.

The next night we were out at the session in The Jolly Brewer, playing trad Irish tunes all evening. Bliss!

Then on the third night, we went to see Low playing in a church. Rich and Ben were there too.

It really felt like The Before Times. Of course in reality it wasn’t quite like old times. There’s always an awareness of relative risk. How crowded is the cinema likely to be? Will they have the doors open at The Jolly Brewer to improve the airflow? Will people at the Low gig comply with the band’s request to wear masks?

Still, in each case, I weighed the risk and decided the evening was worth it. If I caught Covid because of that cinematic double bill, or that tune-filled gathering, or that excellent gig, that price would be acceptable.

Mind you, I say that without having experienced the horribleness of having a nasty bout of coronavirus. And the prospect of long Covid is genuinely scary.

But there’s no doubt that the vaccines have changed the equation. There’s still plenty of risk but it’s on a different scale. The Situation isn’t over, but it has ratcheted down a notch to something more manageable.

Now with the weather starting to get nice, there’ll be more opportunities for safer outdoor gatherings. I’m here for it.

Actually, I’m not going to literally be here for all of it. I’m making travel plans to go and speak at European events—another positive signal of the changing situation. Soon I’ll be boarding the Eurostar to head to Amsterdam, and not long after I’ll be on the Eurostar again for a trip to Lille. And then of course there’s UX London at the end of June. With each gathering, there’s an inevitable sense of calculated risk, but there’s also a welcome sense of normality seeping back in.

I went to TEDxBrighton on Friday. I didn’t actually realise it was happening until just a couple of days beforehand, but I once I knew, I figured I should take advantage of it being right here in my own town.

All in all, it was a terrific day. The MCing by Adam Pearson was great—just the right mix of enthusiasm and tongue-in-cheek humour. The curation of the line-up worked well too. The day was broken up into four loosely-themed sections. As I’m currently in the process of curating an event myself, I can appreciate how challenging it is.

Each section opened with a musical act. Again, having been involved behind the scenes with many events myself, I was impressed by the audaciousness, just from a logistical perspective. It all went relatively smoothly.

The talks at a TED or TEDx event can be a mixed bag. You can have a scientist on stage distilling years of research into a succint message followed by someone talking nonsense about some pseudo-psychological self-help scheme. But at TEDxBrighton, we lucked out.

A highlight for me was Dr James Mannion talking about implementation science—something that felt directly applicable to design work. Victoria Jenkins was also terrific, and again, her points about inclusive design felt very relevant. And of course I really enjoyed the space-based talks by Melissa Thorpe and Bianca Cefalo. Now that I think about it, just about everyone was great: Katie Vincent, Lewis Wedlock, Dina Nayeri—they all wowed me.

With one exception. There was a talk that was supposed to be about the future of democracy. In reality it quickly veered into DAOs before descending into a pitch for crypto and NFTs. The call to action was literally for everyone in the audience to go out and get a crypto wallet and buy an NFT …using ethereum no less! We were exhorted to use an unbelievably wasteful and energy-intensive proof-of-work technology to get our hands on a receipt for a JPG …from the same stage that would later highlight the work of climate activists like Tommie Eaton. It was really quite disgusting. The fear-based message of the talk was literally about getting in on the scheme before it’s too late. At one point we were told to “do the research.” I’m surprised we weren’t all told that we’re “not going to make it.”

A disgraceful shill for a ponzi scheme would’ve ruined any other event. Fortunately the line-up at TEDxBrighton was so strong that one scam artist couldn’t torpedo the day. Just like crypto itself—and associated bollocks like NFTs and web3—it was infuriating to have to sit through it in the short term, but then it just faded away into insignificance. One desperate peddler of snake oil couldn’t make a dent in an otherwise great day.

In person events are like buses. You go two years without one and then three come along at once.

My buffer is overflowing from experiencing three back-to-back events. Best of all, my participation was different each time.

First of all, there was Leading Design New York, where I was the host. The event was superb, although it’s a bit of a shame I didn’t have any time to properly experience Manhattan. I wasn’t able to do any touristy things or meet up with my friends who live in the city. Still the trip was well worth it.

Right after I got back from New York, I took the train to Edinburgh for the Design It Build It conference where I was a speaker. It was a good event. I particularly enjoyed Rafaela Ferro talk on accessibility. The last time I spoke at DIBI was 2011(!) so it was great to make a return visit. I liked that the audience was seated cabaret style. That felt safer than classroom-style seating, allowing more space between people. At the same time, it felt more social, encouraging more interaction between attendees. I met some really interesting people.

I got from Edinburgh just in time for UX Camp Brighton on the weekend, where I was an attendee. I felt like a bit of a moocher not giving a presentation, but I really, really enjoyed every session I attended. It’s been a long time since I’ve been at a Barcamp-style event—probably the last Indie Web Camp I attended, whenever that was. I’d forgotten how well the format works.

But even with all these in-person events, online events aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Yesterday I started hosting the online portion of Leading Design New York and I’ll be doing it again today. The post-talk discussions with Julia and Lisa are lots of fun!

So in the space of just of a couple of weeks I’ve been a host, a speaker, and an attendee. Now it’s time for me to get my head back into one other event role: conference curator. No more buses/events are on the way for the next while, so I’m going to be fully devoted to organising the line-up for UX London 2022. Exciting!

On Thursday of last week, Summer arrived in England. I accept full responsibility for this. That morning I left the house early and wore a winter coat. So of course the day was filled with glorious sunshine.

I was up early to head into the Clearleft studio to do a tech check and some pre-records for the upcoming UX Fest. We’ve turned a meeting room into a very swanky-looking recording studio with proper lights, mics, and camera. I’ll be hosting UX Fest, channeling my inner Alan Partridge and Ron Burgundy.

Being back in the studio was nice. Some of my Clearleft colleagues joined the agency during The Situation so this was my first chance to meet some of them face to face (or facemask to facemask at least).

The next day I had even more opportunity to see my co-workers without the barriers of computer screens. We had a workplace walk in the countryside to mark one year of becoming an employee-owned agency. We rendezvoused at Devil’s Dyke and walked a bit of the Sussex countryside, just enough to work up an appetite and a thirst to be satiated at the nearby Shepherd and Dog pub in Fulking (near the brilliantly named Fulking Hill). We sat at tables outside, had pints of ale, and a proper pub lunch, chatting all the while, just like in The Before Times.

When I got back to Brighton I met up with Jessica for a beer in the sun before wandered down to the beach together to meet our friend Kate and celebrate her birthday.

Two days of good weather was a blessing, but it didn’t stop there. The next day, Saturday, was even sunnier. We spent the day working in the garden. We planted salads in our raised beds and then fortified those raised beds to make them impenatrable to the family of foxes living in our neighbourbood. Don’t get me wrong, the fox cubs are very cute. I just don’t want them digging up our salads.

On Sunday, Jessica and I sauntered up the hill to Brighton Racecourse so we could cheer on Jake as he finished his hundred kilometre walk from London to Brighton. Normally this would be a very strange behaviour, but it was all for a good cause.

After that, we had a pub lunch (outdoors, of course) before heading home. I spent the rest of the day sitting out in the garden, admiring the handiwork of the previous day, reading and occasionally dozing.

Today it’s more of the same. Glorious sunshine. Sitting in the garden. Reading. Playing some tunes on the mandolin. Looking forward to grilling outside for the third evening in a row.

It feels like something is changing and it’s not just the weather. The Situation, while far from ending, is certainly morphing. I still don’t plan on spending any time indoors, but with weather this good, I don’t need to.

In two weeks time I’ll get my second jab of vaccine. Two weeks after that I can start letting my guard down a bit more. Until then, I’ll be staying outdoors. If the weather continues like this, that won’t be a hardship.

It was very hot here in England last week. By late afternoon, the stuffiness indoors was too much to take.

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. That’s exactly what Jessica and I did. The time had come for us to avail of someone else’s kitchen. For the first time in many months, we ventured out for an evening meal. We could take advantage of the government discount scheme with the very unfortunate slogan, “eat out to help out.” (I can’t believe that no one in that meeting said something.)

Just to be clear, we wanted to dine outdoors. The numbers are looking good in Brighton right now, but we’re both still very cautious about venturing into indoor spaces, given everything we know now about COVID-19 transmission.

Fortunately for us, there’s a new spot on the seafront called Shelter Hall Raw. It’s a collective of multiple local food outlets and it has ample outdoor seating.

We found a nice table for two outside. Then we didn’t flag down a waiter.

Instead, we followed the instructions on the table. I say instructions, but it was a bit simpler than that. It was a URL: shelterhall.co.uk (there was also a QR code next to the URL that I could’ve just pointed my camera at, but I’ve developed such a case of QR code blindness that I blanked that out initially).

Just to be clear, under the current circumstances, this is the only way to place an order at this establishment. The only (brief) interaction you’ll have with another persn is when someone brings your order.

It worked a treat.

We had frosty beverages chosen from the excellent selection of local beers. We also had fried chicken sandwiches from Lost Boys chicken, purveyors of the best wings in town.

The whole experience was a testament to what the web can do. You browse the website. You make your choice on the website. You pay on the website (you can create an account but you don’t have to).

Thinking about it, I can see why they chose the web over a native app. Online ordering is the only way to place your order at this place. Telling people “You have to go to this website” …that seems reasonable. But telling people “You have to download this app” …that’s too much friction.

It hasn’t been a great week for the web. Layoffs at Mozilla. Google taking aim at URLs. It felt good to see experience an instance of the web really shining.

And it felt really good to have that cold beer.

Friday was FF Conf day here in Brighton. This was the eleventh(!) time that Remy and Julie have put on the event. It was, as ever, excellent.

It’s a conference that ticks all the boxes for me. For starters, it’s a single-track event. The more I attend conferences, the more convinced I am that multi-track events are a terrible waste of time for attendees (and a financially bad model for organisers). I know that sounds like a sweeping broad generalisation, but ask me about it next time we meet and I’ll go into more detail. For now, I just want to talk about this mercifully single-track conference.

FF Conf has built up a rock-solid reputation over the years. I think that’s down to how Remy curates it. He thinks about what he wants to know and learn more about, and then thinks about who to invite to speak on those topics. So every year is like a snapshot of Remy’s brain. By happy coincidence, a snapshot of Remy’s brain right now looks a lot like my own.

You could tell that Remy had grouped the talks together in themes. There was a performance-themed chunk right after lunch. There was a people-themed chunk in the morning. There was a creative-coding chunk at the end of the day. Nice work, DJ.

I think it was quite telling what wasn’t on the line-up. There were no talks about specific libraries or frameworks. For me, that was a blessed relief. The only technology-specific talk was Alice’s excellent talk on Git—a tool that’s useful no matter what you’re coding.

One of the reasons why I enjoyed the framework-free nature of the day is that most talks—and conferences—that revolve around libraries and frameworks are invariably focused on the developer experience. Think about it: next time you’re watching a talk about a framework or library, ask yourself how it impacts user experience.

At FF Conf, the focus was firmly on people. In the case of Laura’s barnstorming presentation, those people are end users (I’m constantly impressed by how calm and measured Laura remains even when talking about blood-boilingly bad behaviour from the tech industry). In the case of Amina’s talk, the people are junior developers. And for Sharon’s presentation, the people are everyone.

One of the most useful talks of the day was from Anna who took us on a guided tour of dev tools to identify performance improvements. I found it inspiring in a very literal sense—if I had my laptop with me, I think I would’ve opened it up there and then and started tinkering with my websites.

Harry also talked about performance, but at Remy’s request, it was more business focused. Specifically, it was focused on Harry’s consultancy business. I think this would’ve been the perfect talk for more of an “industry” event, whereas FF Conf is very much a community event: Harry’s semi-serious jibes about keeping his performance secrets under wraps didn’t quite match the generous tone of the rest of the line-up.

The final two talks from Charlotte and Suz were a perfect double whammy.

When I saw Charlotte speak at Material in Iceland last year, I wrote this aside in my blog post summary:

(Oh, and Remy, when you start to put together the line-up for next year’s FF Conf, be sure to check out Charlotte Dann—her talk at Material was the perfect mix of code and creativity.)

I don’t think I can take credit for Charlotte being on the line-up, but I will take credit for saying she’d be the perfect fit.

And then Suz Hinton closed out the conference with this rallying cry that resonated perfectly with Laura’s talk:

Less mass-produced surveillance bullshit and more Harry Potter magic (please)!

I think that rallying cry could apply equally well to conferences, and I think FF Conf is a good example of that ethos in action.

Remember when I wrote about adding travel maps to my site at the recent Indie Web Camp Brighton? I must confess that the last line I wrote was an attempt to catch a fish from the river of the lazy web:

It’s a shame that I can’t use the lovely Stamen watercolour tiles for these static maps though.

In the spirit of Cunningham’s Law, I was hoping that somebody was going to respond with “It’s totally possible to use Stamen’s watercolour tiles for static maps, dumbass—look!” (to which my response would have been “thank you very much!”).

Alas, no such response was forthcoming. The hoped-for schooling never forthcame.

Still, I couldn’t quite let go of the idea of using those lovely watercolour maps somewhere on my site. But I had decided that dynamic maps would have been overkill for my archive pages:

Sure, it looked good, but displaying the map required requests for a script, a style sheet, and multiple map tiles.

Then I had a thought. What if I keep the static maps on my archive pages, but make them clickable? Then, on the other end of that link, I can have the dynamic version. In other words, what if I had a separate URL just for the dynamic maps?

These seemed like a good plan to me, so while I was travelling by Eurostar—the only way to travel—back from the lovely city of Antwerp where I had been speaking at Full Stack Europe, I started hacking away on making the dynamic maps even more dynamic. After all, now that they were going to have their own pages, I could go all out with any fancy features I wanted.

I kept coming back to my original goal:

I was looking for something more like the maps in Indiana Jones films—a line drawn from place to place to show the movement over time.

I found a plug-in for Leaflet.js that animates polylines—thanks, Iván! With a bit of wrangling, I was able to get it to animate between the lat/lon points of whichever archive section the map was in. Rather than have it play out automatically, I also added a control so that you can start and stop the animation. While I was at it, I decided to make that “play/pause” button do something else too. Ahem.

If you’d like to see the maps in action, click the “play” button on any of these maps:

• Everything from this August.
• Links from June 2017.
• Photos from October 2014.
• The entirety of 2018—that might take a while.

You get the idea. It’s all very silly really. It’s right up there with the time I made my sparklines playable. But that’s kind of the point. It’s my website so I can do whatever I want with it, no matter how silly.

First of all, the research department for adactio.com (that’s me) came up with the idea. Then that had to be sold in to upper management (that’s me too). A team was spun up to handle design and development (consisting of me and me). Finally, the finished result went live thanks to the tireless efforts of the adactio.com ops group (that would be me). Any feedback should be directed at the marketing department (no idea who that is).

It was Indie Web Camp Brighton on the weekend. After a day of thought-provoking discussions, I thoroughly enjoyed spending the second day tinkering on my website.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to add maps to my monthly archive pages (to accompany the calendar heatmaps I added at a previous Indie Web Camp). Whenever I post anything to my site—a blog post, a note, a link—it’s timestamped and geotagged. I thought it would be fun to expose that in a glanceable way. A map seems like the right medium for that, but I wanted to avoid the obvious route of dropping a load of pins on a map. Instead I was looking for something more like the maps in Indiana Jones films—a line drawn from place to place to show the movement over time.

I talked to Aaron about this and his advice was that a client-side JavaScript embedded map would be the easiest option. But that seemed like overkill to me. This map didn’t need to be pannable or zoomable; just glanceable. So I decided to see if how far I could get with a static map. I timeboxed two hours for it.

After two hours, I admitted defeat.

I was able to find the kind of static maps I wanted from Mapbox—I’m already using them for my check-ins. I could even add a polyline, which is exactly what I wanted. But instead of passing latitude and longitude co-ordinates for the points on the polyline, the docs explain that I needed to provide …cur ominous thunder and lightning… The Encoded Polyline Algorithm Format.

Go to that link. I’ll wait.

Did you read through the eleven steps of instructions? Did you also think it was a piss take?

1. Take the initial signed value.
2. Multiply it by 1e5.
3. Convert that decimal value to binary.
4. Left-shift the binary value one bit.
5. If the original decimal value is negative, invert this encoding.
6. Break the binary value out into 5-bit chunks.
7. Place the 5-bit chunks into reverse order.
8. OR each value with 0x20 if another bit chunk follows.
9. Convert each value to decimal.
10. Add 63 to each value.
11. Convert each value to its ASCII equivalent.

This was way beyond my brain’s pay grade. But surely someone else had written the code I needed? I did some Duck Duck Going and found a piece of PHP code to do the encoding. It didn’t work. I Ducked Ducked and Went some more. I found a different piece of PHP code. That didn’t work either.

At this point, my allotted time was up. If I wanted to have something to demo by the end of the day, I needed to switch gears. So I did.

I used Leaflet.js to create the maps I wanted using client-side JavaScript. Here’s the JavaScript code I wrote.

It waits until the page has finished loading, then it searches for any instances of the h-geo microformat (a way of encoding latitude and longitude coordinates in HTML). If there are three or more, it generates a script element to pull in the Leaflet library, and a corresponding style element. Then it draws the map with the polyline on it. I ended up using Stamen’s beautiful watercolour map tiles.

That’s what I demoed at the end of the day.

But I wasn’t happy with it.

Sure, it looked good, but displaying the map required requests for a script, a style sheet, and multiple map tiles. I made sure that it didn’t hold up the loading of the rest of the page, but it still felt wasteful.

So after Indie Web Camp, I went back to investigate static maps again. This time I did finally manage to find some PHP code for encoding lat/lon coordinates into a polyline that worked. Finally I was able to construct URLs for a static map image that displays a line connecting multiple points with a line.

I’ve put this maps on any of the archive pages that also have calendar heat maps. Some examples:

• Everything from August 2019
• Notes from July 2018
• Links from June 2017
• Photos from October 2014
• Journal entries from December 2012

If you go back much further than that, the maps start to trail off. That’s because I wasn’t geotagging everything from the start.

I’m pretty happy with the final results. It’s certainly far more responsible from a performance point of view. Oh, and I’ve also got the maps inside a picture element so that I can swap out the tiles if you switch to dark mode.

It’s a shame that I can’t use the lovely Stamen watercolour tiles for these static maps though.

Your weekends are valuable. Spend them wisely. I have some suggestion on how you might spend next weekend, October 19th and 20th, depending on where you are in the world.

If you’re in the bay area, or anywhere near San Francisco, I highly recommend that you go to Science Hack Day—two days of science, hacking, and fun. This will be the last one in San Francisco so don’t miss your chance.

If you’re in the south of England, or anywhere near Brighton, come along to Indie Web Camp. Saturday will feature discussions on owning your data. Sunday will be a day of doing. I’ve written about previous Indie Web Camps before, and I really can’t recommend it highly enough!

Do me a favour and register for a spot—it’s free—so I’ve got some idea of numbers. Looking forward to seeing you there!