Responsive Design Weekly - The One After A Three Month Break

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Well that was a long drinks break!!!

After going for almost ten years and only missing a couple of weeks with the newsletter this has been a three month sabbatical from the weekly updates.

Phew, and what a three months.

Before I get into that journey, I wanted to give a shout out to one of my favourite conferences put on by one of my favourite group of people (looks at your specifically Dave).

The State of the Browser 2021 conference is coming up on the 30th October at Conway Hall in London. Don’t fear though, if you’re not able to make it to London or if you’re still wary of Covid crowds and are more comfortable in the safety of your own home this is both an in-person and online event.

Find our more information https://2021.stateofthebrowser.com/.

Advertise your product, service, or job opportunity to 25,908 tuned in web designers and developers. Find out more.

Switching focus

For almost ten years you would find this email in your inbox at the end of the week which contained a bunch of links to (hopefully) helpful articles along with a brief description about what you’d expect to find when you clicked.

Anyone that has ever created these kinds of emails or written wrap up emails will know that it isn’t a matter of copy and pasting links for the week, or at least in the case of this newsletter it certainly wasn’t the case.

Along with the 5-10 articles that would be submitted on Twitter or email, there were around 800—1000 articles to scan through on a Feedly RSS feed. From those articles I would pull out what I thought were the most interesting and topical for the week and read each of them. From there, probably 5% of the read articles would make it into the newsletter.

It was exhausting… but it was wonderful. The whole process kept me up-to-date with how people like you were building websites and approaching problems, and I was fortunate enough to then share your stories with the RWD Weekly audience.

The key reason that I was able to spend some much time and effort on the research side of things was due to it relating partially to my day job, but also that my day job hadn’t changed much in 6 years. When you’ve been doing the same thing for long periods of time, the mental effort required to do the work and deal with issues is much less than when you’re doing something new.

In January of 2021, I found something new.

I stumbled across a new project that was trying to solve problems with the rising Web3 platform and was quickly swept up with interesting conversations on their Discord, soaking up as much new information as I could in the early days and trying to simplify the explanations to other folks who were just getting started as well.

This became almost all consuming and I found myself spending all my spare time and mental energy in the pursuit of learning more about the applications of Web3 and how I could support the project with my knowledge of how the Web2 world works (despite the desire from the folks in the Web3 industry, practically speaking you need both Web2 and Web3 to make a successful product — at least for now).

In March I quit my job and joined NFTX as a core contributor, although there was a painful period of 5 months where any spare time outside of my 9—5 was dedicated to the new role (a quick shout out to Laura, Mrs RWD Weekly, for taking on everything during that time).

In June I was finally able to step back down to just the one job and I was exhausted. I needed to rest before I burned out even further, and that came in the pausing of the weekly newsletter.

I have certainly missed keeping up with what’s happening in the world of RWD and front-end development, but that has been replaced with dealing with performance using tools like SpeedCurve, caching and data transformation with CloudFlare Workers, creating your own caching layers to improve third party endpoints with NGINX , becoming the “MongoDB guy” and a number of other new roles and responsibilities.

The newsletter will continue but it will drop back from weekly to every two weeks, and while it will still have some connotations around responsive web design it will have have more of a focus around the development of real Web3 based applications…. Or Real Web3 Development if I’m going to stretch it to match the ongoing acronym :)

If you have any questions about Web3 please shoot them through here, they can be specific technical questions or general questions around the ideas or concepts.

I’ve missed you, it’s good to be back!

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Responsive Design Weekly - The One After A Three Month Break

Switching focus

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