Awesome finds - January 2024

Some things I liked in January'24.

Culture stuff

Movies

Klaus: After several recommendations, I finally got around to seeing it (on New Year's Day, of course). A very, very sweet little thing that is extremely difficult not to like, even though it is charmingly naive. I'm not a fan of animation, so it's literally been years since I've seen one, which may account for the rather high rating, but at the same time it's very well done, so that's fine with me. 🎅

Poor Things: Wow, I was not at all prepared for how good it turned out to be. I didn't read anything before going to the cinema (on a premiere day in Poland!), so it was surprisingly NSFW, but that certainly added a bit of spice and charm to the whole experience. And it really is an experience: an absolutely mesmerising journey rendered in bold, colourful strokes, with unique characters you will instantly love and colours you can only dream about. And the dresses - oh, the dresses...

Music

It's been mostly quiet for me, but Jordan Rakei's EP stucks with you for real, and a new The Vaccines album sounds pretty great live, so here's that.

Tech

React Server Components: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: There's still a lot of friction and misunderstanding, but I think people are coming around, so here's a great article from Mayank. What I really liked about it is that it's a real experience, however good/bad/ugly it may be. I've run into some of the same challenges they describe when trying to make my own applications based on RSC, and this article describes the joys and frustrations very well.

React Native + Expo = ❤️: For years I thought it would be quite a challenge to develop for mobile, and even React Native was not enough to convince me to try it as a weekend project. In January I tried Expo for my new pet project Twitterhop, and... Why didn't anyone tell me you could go from zero to an app in about 10 minutes? DX was absolutely exceptional, even with some new paradigms compared to React (mainly markup) it was really easy to get a fully working prototype in several of hours (much of it spent googling/ChatGPT-ing tiny bits).

Products

Perfume: En Passant by Frederic Malle: Ultimate, like 100% concentrated lilac, it is more lilac than ever in real life, but somehow not overpowering. Spring vibes! 💟

Airalo: ✨ blessed ✨ not to have to worry about mobile operators/sim cards/fees etc when travelling within the EU, but it's not the usual hassle abroad either: literally ordered and set up an e-sim with a couple of clicks in the app while waiting at border control in the UK. Pretty neat!