Freelancers meet up in Brighton on 2nd August 2023

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Last week we had our freelancers networking meet up in the Battle of Trafalgar pub in Brighton. Ten people attended, including James for the first time.

Here is some of what we talked about:

  • When to look for rental property
  • Working on your own projects
  • React and React Native
  • Controlling your expenses
  • The room that is a Tardis
  • Drupal templating
  • Trying to get cross-platform and cross-language templating working – is Twig the answer?
  • Backstop and Storybook
  • Yoast SEO plugin problems
  • Having your own Open Source projects
  • Open Source – do people contribute? (Very, very few)
  • Favoured editors
  • Committing your VS Code config to share useful settings within teams
  • Improving sports
  • Champagne Socialism
  • Purism phone experiences
  • What is a Request Smuggling Attack?
  • Creating and controlling SVGs with code
  • DDev and Docker
  • Security and running third party code

Highlights

When to look for rental property in Brighton

The worst time to look are in September and early October, as Brighton has a large student population and this is the time many students are desperate having found they should have been looking before the summer break. Another bad time to look is June-July, although that’s not quite as bad, as that is the organised students booking places to rent when they return for the Autumn term. Other times of year should be fine, which in Brighton’s market means things go quickly but it’s not quite as insane as when you have a bunch of desperate people who really need something right now.

Sharing VS Code config files

I was put onto this by Haze and it’s one of those ideas that’s both brilliant and really obvious in retrospect.

VS Code is a very popular editor from Microsoft that runs on all the big operating systems. It has a configuration system that I’ve found quite awkward and relies on a JSON file.

Working with a team of developers? Well, you can check that file into Git (or whatever source control you use) and share it with the other developers so they can pick out the useful settings. This might be SSH config, useful linting rules, whatever. This doesn’t mean everyone has to run their editor with exactly the same settings, it means that for a project you can share useful settings with other people, with a little effort as they pick and choose which to copy. Brilliant. VS Code is already a good editor and I can see that pushing it to the top for some people.