Cèilidh Note

Yikes, another week of poor sleep. Twice not until gone 4am. It's become pretty much the norm. Boring to update on. Let's just assume I'm very tired from now on. Be kind to me, friend, if you spot grammatical or spelling mistakes.

• This week was the anniversary of our relationship. We already knew each other from work, but for our first proper date we went to a cèilidh. A cèilidh! Since then we've cèilidh-ed every year to celebrate.
• Sadly it's not Covid secure to dance in close quarters, holding hands and spinning around with 80 plus sweaty strangers. Instead we treated ourselves by braving the Tube and heading to China Town. It was the perfect evening.
• The rain was heavy but thrilling, everything's a novelty now isn't it? We were safe under our umbrellas and soon arrived at a pub we like ― our second pub visit since March, our first inside. It was cosy. Not busy. And the bouncer was doing an excellent job at the door, checking for masks and sending some groups away. There was a fire. I had a fresh Guinness! It was so cosy and all too wonderful given the situation this year 😭
• We headed to a restaurant, continuing our wild night not in the flat. China town is on it! Our hand sanitising and temperature check was handled deftly as part of a smooth and relaxing welcome.
• And guess what? They had vegetarian soup dumplings! Sploosh! Nom nom nom.
• You've heard enough of this extravagance, sorry, dear reader. It was just nice to be able to celebrate.
• What else happened this week?
• I had a think about why I'm still on Twitter. Is it an addiction to doom scrolling? Maybe, but that's not a good reason. Perhaps to keep up with news in the world of tech? Or champions of a cause? No, there are better forums (podcasts, blogs, edited aggregators, actual publications). The only positive thing I can think of is having an opportunity to connect with friends and colleagues, and the things they care about.
• So I purged my feed and now only follow people I know, with a couple of exceptions for people I've engaged with enough to feel like I know 😅 I'm hoping to: be less despairing on Twitter; see more from the people I'm close to; pick up other content intentionally and with focus. Let's see how it goes.
• On the topic of tech news and content discovery, I'd recommend watching Designing Intrinsic Layouts by Jen Simmons. Jen shows how we can build modern layouts with CSS Grid and Flexbox, often using content length to determine layout. The result is more reliable, flexible layouts with less CSS. In the video Jen also shows some inspiring examples of more creative layouts for the web. I've followed Jen's work for a while. My biggest take away from watching this was that Jen annotated screenshots to figure out a layout in CSS ― I should be doing that!
• In other work related discoveries, I learnt briefly about EventSource this week. It's a method of pushing events from a server to a client over HTTP. The Financial Times use it to deliver live updates on developing stories. It seems to me like a more familiar alternative to WebSockets. Unlike WebSockets though EventSource is unidirectional. The server sends events to the client but the client can't send an event back.
• That's all for now. Until a sudden spike of energy and enthusiasm seizes me late tonight, I'm off to lounge about and eat biscuits.
• Ta-ta, be well!