Some of you will be aware that while I'm not necessarily great at it, I enjoy playing around with hardware. One of the talks that I've been fortunate enough to travel the world to give is about using JavaScript to do bits of home automation, including automating my curtains and making my own thermostat.
So it may come as no real surprise that when I heard there was going to be a Christmas jumper competition at work last year, I decided add LEDs to my jumper and connect it to the Internet.
At the end of 2018, I announced that I was setting a 6 month deadline for LeedsJS to move away from Meetup. At the time they charged $90 for 6 months as an organiser, which I was paying out of my own pocket. At the time of writing, this has been raised to $98.94.
I first got involved in LeedsJS
in 2015, and then took over as the main organiser in 2016. Since then, we've grown from around 15 people per event to about 60 per event.
When we were looking for a new venue for LeedsJS a few years ago, one of the criteria I set was "not a pub". Initially this seems like an arbitrary decision, but I had a number of reasons for doing so.
2018 has been an eventful year, with more personal firsts and a number of successful personal projects!
If you want to see last year's post, you can find it here.
Friday the 7th September 2012 was a bad day for me. That was the day that I was fired from my first development job. It was the beginning of a 7 month unemployment period where I struggled with depression, impostor syndrome and I asked myself some tough questions.
I've tried to start writing this post a few times. Mental health is a difficult topic to speak about in itself, and struggling with your own mental health can make it even more difficult.
While this post is difficult to write, I want to be open about it. I hope that this can help other people feel like they can talk about their mental health too.
The day before April's LeedsJS meetup, I decided to try not having Q&A after the talks in favour of encouraging people to come and chat to the speakers directly. There were a variety of reasons as to why I felt that this would be the best route, and it seems to have been a success!
At LeedsJS we've been lucky enough to have sponsors willing to offer up prizes for us to give away to our attendees. We've tried a couple of ways to give them away and I thought I'd write up a post to discuss them.
Modern browsers have the native selector engine document.querySelectorAll which is really useful for easily finding elements. I had assumed that it returned an Array but I've just found out that I was wrong and it returns a NodeList.