I'm in the kitchen at work mourning the loss of my intern. She's not dead or anything, but today is her last day and we're all very sad about this fact.
I also just got back from a trip to London to visit the family for an early Christmas-ish type trip. London is good for sparkly lights, mince pies, fancy dinners and having breakfast at the next table over from George Lucas!
Just before I left, I was gifted a copy of Public Digital's new little bright yellow magazine, Signals (thank you, Ben!). Still working through it. It's a collection of short pieces of writing by various people about working the public sector.
Very yellow
On Wednesday, I had possibly the most wholesome holiday party, ever - a semi-competitive flower-arranging game and sake with my ikebana class. I forgot to take a picture, but needless to say everyone was a winner.
This last two weeks felt long. I don't remember why I missed week notes last week, but I am betting it was something to do with being asleep.
Notable events:
Chrome Dev Summit was both good (PWA book!) and bad (yay, sexism, again!). It was a particularly excellent week for seeing people I like a lot because they all had to come to the event for work, though. We forced many of them to visit our home for brunch.
California caught fire, again. It's really extremely sad, so I don't even think I should be allowed to complain that the ashes of people's lives, homes and businesses raining down on San Francisco were a reason I had to stay inside for 5 days straight.
Our friends from England working on Poplar came to visit and we had a really fun and interesting evening talking about their work over at Stamen HQ.
Two thirds of Poplar went on a jaunt with Alex and I to Stinson beach.
It's Thanksgiving and this year I am thankful for not having to go anywhere or see anyone and being allowed to play Fallout 76.
Gifts from an aforementioned friend visiting for CDS
This time last year, I was at Chrome Dev Summit. I ran into Jason Grigsby, who I am always glad to chat with. He mentioned, slightly off-hand, that he was writing a new book about Progressive Web Apps and jokingly suggested that I would be a good person to contribute to a foreword.
The foreword is written by myself and Alex, and we mean every word we say in it. We couldn't be happier with how Jason's book turned out and it's really the only book you need if you want to understand why, and how, you should be building PWAs.
I'm very thankful for his kindness and the opportunity to contribute in a tiny way to his amazing work.
Missed a week due to being on a plane to Long Beach for a wedding. The way I've been managing to do week notes again is by literally putting a 15 minute placeholder in my calendar so nothing gets scheduled over it, in a time I'm usually free, which obviously fails when I'm not.
In the last couple weeks we had our big company sponsored event - JAMstack_conf. I am generally kind of exhausted and bored by a lot of events these days (that's a me problem rather than a problem with events), but I found this one very invigorating and not just because we were hosting. There's something really fresh, and yet old-skool, going on with the JAMstack - people making sites that are best for the platform and that work really well on the open web - feels like the same wave that's causing everyone to start publishing back to their own sites and blogs again. I love it.
I've also done two of my civic duties as an American this week - I voted in the midterms and I did jury duty! Sadly, I didn't actually get called in for a court case. Maybe next time.
Mostly, though, I have been playing Red Dead Redemption 2. 36% complete.
It is week 273, which will be forever known as the week that I finally got my first ikenobo ikebana diplomas. I'm like a legit flower arranger now. My name will be forever in some 500 year old ledger somewhere in Kyoto.
