Weeknotes - w/c 17th June 2019

/ About 4 min reading time

The response to my HTML article

Last Friday I sat down with my morning coffee, put Love Island on the TV and started writing a paragraph about how annoyed I was by ‘Frontend Engineers’ who couldn’t write decent HTML. That turned into a bit of a ranty essay which I then published on this site. The response I’ve had to that article has been overwhelming. My Twitter notifications have been ringing off the hook, I’ve been getting emails asking for markup advice, and some just wishing me well and thanking me for my article. I’ve seen other blog posts quoting heavily from the piece and putting forth their own thoughts, and I’ve had some fantastic discussions.

I wrote that piece because I was angry about something important in my industry) that affects everybody who uses the Web. Please keep sharing it and spreading the word and hopefully it’ll make at least a small dent.

Fitness is failing me

Mostly because I’ve been so busy at work of late, my training consistency and subsequently my fitness has been faltering. I’m only managing to get out on the bike once or twice a week and when I do I’m tired before I’ve started. I went out with my cycling club, VC York, on Saturday and just suffered from the off. It’s a long time since I’ve felt like that on a bike - nauseous on every climb. I need to do something about that.

This is a combination of needing to rest more and needing to ride more. So...

I need a holiday

And I’ve booked one. Just me and Nicki in a romantic hotel on Majorca, which also happens to be a cycling heaven. I mean, I fully intend on having a relaxing week with my Wife by the pool, but I might throw my helmet, shoes and pedals in the suitcase, just in case.

Eating out

We went to one of York’s best restaurants, Rattle Owl, on Thursday night for a rare date-night. We’d signed up a while ago to go on a culinary tour of the building and didn’t know quite what to expect (well, we knew we’d get amazing food, we’ve eaten there before). The tour began with a glass of fizz in the basement - a room that Clarrie, the owner, didn’t know existed when she took on the building. It was accidentally discovered by the builder working on renovations but was full of soil that had been back filled from a previous extension. York being York, excavating a basement is not a straightforward task and you never know what you’ll discover or how much it’s going to cost. What Clarrie discovered was that her 17th century building was built on top of a 14th century building, which in turn was built on top of a Roman townhouse from the Roman occupation of York around 100AD. She also found a body.

The tour continued and it was fascinating throughout. This was a wonderful way to eat a meal. There were a dozen of us, some couples, some small groups and some on their own, sitting around a single dining table with the owner, chatting to strangers as friends and finding out about this amazing building over fantastic food and wine in a casual fine-dining style. At one point I was engaged in a delightful conversation about art and technology with a neurosurgeon from Dundee and a Health Economist from Massachusetts.

We finished in the top lounge, sat on sofas with cheese and biscuits and a glass of Muscat, talking politics.

Rattle Owl is one of a number of fantastic fine-dining locations in York now. If you can get booked on a culinary tour evening, I’d heartily recommend it. If you can’t, just go there for a meal, I’d heartily recommend that too.

Years and Years

I finished watching the BBC’s short near-future drama, Years and Years this week. Oh boy, what a thing. Such a powerful piece of television that follows a family over the next ten years of our changing political, technological and societal landscape. It’s like Black Mirror, except it’s almost definitely all going to happen, and that’s terrifying. We live in scary times and it’s going to get scarier before it gets easier. That’s our fault, and Years and Years shows us why.

If you haven’t seen it, you need to. I couldn’t binge-watch it though. Every episode was exhausting, and in some cases harrowing. The final moments of the last episode had me loudly sobbing.

Around the Web

A lot of HTML related links this week. Quite a few were recommended reading from the twitter responses to my article.