Weeknotes 4/2021

Side projects

Somewhere

I managed to finish the animations for the loading screen which also act as onboarding. You can check them out in the video below. It's always great to see how powerful a couple of simple CSS animations and transitions can be. I'm very pleased with the result. 🤩

Ping

I spent only an hour or two on ping this week. I made the sign up screen component more generic to also support sign in. Next step in the proof of concept is to build a basic version of the screen that will let users collaborate.

Oh and I looked into callable functions on Firebase. I'm currently using Vercel's serverless functions but I'm pretty sure that after the proof of concept I will port those to callable functions. They are just a tad more convenient to work with when you are already using other Firebase products. 🔥

Life

We are moving to a new apartment at the end of March and it's really hard to plan a kitchen when all kitchen studios are closed. Pretty much our only option is the IKEA kitchen planner website.

It's a pretty powerful tool and it must be one hell of a big engineering project. You can build your entire kitchen, it renders an interactive 3D model, checks for potential issues, tells you the price, has a huge catalogue of items etc.

I looked under the hood a bit and it seems to be a WebAssembly project which made me even more curious 🤯.

Also: IKEA and WebAssembly...get it? 😂

Right, I will see myself out 🏃‍♂️

Entertainment

I watched a lot of The Expanse over the weekend and am almost at the end of the current season. To slow me down a bit, I started to read The end of all things by John Scalzi. Which also is the the final novel in its own series (the Old Man's war). It's always so annoying to finish a series 😅 I really need to find new a sci-fi book and/or TV show. Maybe there is something similar to The Expanse?

Staying true to this week's subliminal sci-fi topic, we played (Ultra) Tiny Epic Galaxies. I love this game for so many reasons. It's both single- and multiplayer, you can adjust the difficulty level and there are so many different planets and abilities to discover. It makes every round unique. Also, the ultra tiny version of this game fits into my pocket 😄

Song of the week

This week I have a Steve Reich remix for you. My favorite remix of "Music For 18 Musicians (Section VI)". This one is created by Joe Acheson, the creative mastermind behind Hidden Orchestra. I could not find the track on its own though, only embedded in other mixtapes. It plays from 12:52 in this mix: