Weeknote 160

Brighton Web Day Out, Back at the Design Museum

• Monday marked three years since I moved to Wimbledon. Feeling fairly well settled there now, though it’s hard to know how much longer I’ll actually be here. So much hinges on personal circumstances, what the housing market decides to do in the middle of global conflict, and the kind of financial uncertainty that seems to deepen by the week.
• The week itself felt unusually short because I was down at the Brighton Web Day Out conference on Thursday. I stayed focused for the whole event because the talks were so good. I came away with a few new code-related ideas. Harry Roberts’ talk stood out, especially his take on how the last decade of web development got swallowed by an overreliance on JavaScript frameworks that often created more confusion, gatekeeping, and an overreliance on code dependencies, rather than actual progress.
• Before and after the talks I caught up with plenty of familiar faces including people from my organisation and others who’d travelled in from Germany, Austria, Sweden and France. The “drink at the pub” afterwards took a very British turn and escalated into a full‑on cocktail session, with the volume rising in step with everyone’s alcohol intake. I made an early exit; once it tips into that classic shouty‑pub energy, I leave.
• I stayed in Brighton from Wednesday to Friday and finally visited Malo, the Argentine cafe I’ve been meaning to try since it opened over a year ago. Picked up fresh empanadas and alfajores. The selection was huge, and both were excellent.
• On Sunday, I joined Ximena for a visit to the Design Museum to see the Wes Anderson exhibition, plus Blitz. Each had its own self-contained world and atmosphere: immersive, meticulously put together, and the kind of curation that makes you forget you’re in a gallery in the middle of London for a while.