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Phil Wolstenholme (me!)

Phil Wolstenholme

Hi 👋, welcome to my personal site. It’s part blog, part portfolio, part place to try new things.

I'm a lead frontend engineer at the Co-op. I have a wide range of skills, knowledge, and experience, particularly focussed on accessibility and frontend web performance. Outside of work I'm interested in science, the environment, bouldering, bikes (everyday/utility), and open source software.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet…

Posts from Bluesky or Mastodon, blog posts from DEV/Medium, talks from YouTube and beyond, photos from Instagram, music from Spotify, and nice places from Foursquare (lol, I know, but I've built the API integration now so Foursquare lives on on this website!).

Section titled Words

Words

Blog posts I've posted on DEV Community or Medium (one day I'll build my own blog, I promise…)

Section titled Reading

Reading

Some things I've been reading recently and some random items from the vaults:

Section titled Speaking

Speaking

Talks I've given at conferences or other events. I'll link to slides or videos where they are available.

Section titled Music

Music

According to the Spotify API, I've been listening to a bit of metropopolis, deep liquid, alternative emo, uk dnb, drum and bass and liquid funk over the last few weeks (their genre names, not mine!)

You can click the cards above to play a little preview of the artist, courtesy of the Spotify API. I also use the Spotify API to get the tempo/BPM of the preview song, and I use this to influence the speed that a card bops at while its playing.

Press the pause icon or the esc key on your keyboard to stop the previews.  

Section titled Photos

Photos

Photos and videos from Instagram.

  • Likes: 47

    Tagged location: Wilderness, Western Cape

    SA pics part 2, ft. penguin, seals, Wilderness sunsets, running and balling

  • Likes: 19

    Tagged location: Cape Town, Western Cape

    Massively delayed South Africa pics from the Cape Town part of the trip, ft. wine farm @reneehlozek encounters, lots of swimming, Table Mountain, paragliding, gyrocopter-ing (?) and a weird beer/marg slushy abomination. Excuse the topless sunset photo, but on hot trips a majority of my holiday photos are me looking like an overheating dweeb in a nerdy hat, so… 🤷‍♂️

  • Likes: 49 Comments: 2

    Tagged location: Malta

    Delayed pics from my birthday trip to Malta! My phone blew up halfway through, the Airbnb guy tried to get us to replace a £230 Kartell perspex table that we don't remember even touching, we hired bikes but the mainland is super car-centric and everyone seemed to be a manic driver, it was uncharacteristically stormy so our ferry was cancelled on one leg of the journey and we couldn't swim on many of the days and Marli's birthday present to me of a flying (in a microlite, 70s Bond style!) experience couldn't happen… Despite all this, it was a good trip and nice to be away! In the end Airbnb gave in and the host's claim was rejected, and I got Google to send me a new phone even though mine was half a year out of warranty, so all's well that ends well!

  • Likes: 21 Comments: 4

    Tagged location: Electric Castle

    Electric Castle in Romania was lovely to look at, and we saw some really good sets considering we bought tickets all the way back in 2019 for the grand price of around £90 for a five day festival, but it was also a bit of a slog! After a really nice first evening we found out that the festival is basically 24/7, and our camping spot was about 400m from one of the very very loud stages. Even the 9am sound checks from the main stage further away got through my silicone earplugs and woke me up. The heat really ramped up, and after maybe 2/3 hours of sleep, and it being two weeks after Glastonbury and one week after me starting to test negative from Covid I wasn't my most resilient, and on the second day I got heat exhaustion and was really nauseous, dizzy, unable to make decisions, struggling with words etc. Marli and I slept at a hotel with AC and quieter nights for the rest of the festival, but even this had a challenge. The festival is in the countryside in a small town/village with narrow roads and runs 24/7 coaches back to Cluj (about 40mins to an hour away), but on our second night of being in the hotel the headliner had been Twenty One Pilots and it felt like the festival had sold day tickets to every young fan in Romania - we didn't get to the hotel until 6.30am and we stood in a bus queue for more than 3 hours. The queueing system was a mess, and the busses going out were competing on the narrow roads with the trucks bringing in Gorillaz's gear for the next day's music. Even after the event we got messed around with someone on Booking.com having a low-key fraudulent listing, Chris had his flight home cancelled because of the heatwave melting the runway at Luton, and it took Marli and I almost a full two days to get from Stansted Airport to Manchester because of the trains being messed up from the heat. It was a fun trip and there were definitely highlights (lots of great and cheap wine and beer, a pretty mixed lineup, good times chatting rubbish, a 'TikTok party' that sounded like a naff brand activation but turned out to actually be great fun and mixed by DJ Yoda), but it also felt like a lot of things didn't go right and that got pretty tiring! 😴

  • Likes: 25

    Tagged location: Electric Castle

    Heatstroke and 89p pints (unrelated, I'm sure) in Romania 🥵🍻🇷🇴

  • Likes: 18 Comments: 3

    Glastonbury stage and set photos, featuring emotional highlights from Wolf Alice, Confidence Man, Glass Animals, Pet Shop Boys, Lily Allen appearing during Olivia Rodrigo with a message for the US Supreme Court, Sir Paul McCartney, and er, the Sugababes

  • Likes: 44 Comments: 8

    Some Glastonbury pics, delayed due to post-festival Covid (almost gone!) and the usual post-festival existential slump!

  • Likes: 47 Comments: 1

    Tagged location: Split, Croatia

    Uploading a few Croatia pics to make way for Glastonbury ones! A few weeks ago Marli and I spent some time in Split and Vis (an island near Split), got very hot, rented some great ebikes (my next ebike has to have a torque sensor rather than one of them stick-a-magnet-on-the-spokes ones!), saw some great beaches and got in the sea at least once each day, and ate a lot of ice cream/gelato and pistachio yogurt. Also we went in a UNESCO protected Spar (the first picture) with Roman columns next to the fruit and beer sections!

  • Likes: 23 Comments: 3

    Tagged location: Playa Kašjuni

    Happy birthday to @marley.rude! 🥳

  • Likes: 68 Comments: 9

    Tagged location: Cottonopolis Food & Liquor

    Happy birthday to me (for yesterday!) Another year older and I still have no idea what to do with my hands in photos.

  • Likes: 37 Comments: 3

    Tagged location: University of Liverpool

    #LivUniGrad (for @marley.rude !)

  • Likes: 28 Comments: 1

    Tagged location: Hotel Ottilia by Brøchner Hotels

    Hanging out in Copenhagen while Marli finishes her (Danish company) work Christmas do. Featuring pod hotel first night, Danish Architecture Centre, then a much fancier hotel in one of the original Carlsberg brewery buildings for the rest of the trip! Free wine hour from 5-6! #copenhagen #cph

Section titled Posts

Posts

Bluesky and sometimes Mastodon posts by me

I'm not sold on the colour scheme yet but as of last night wolstenhol.me is now showing Bluesky posts where it used to show Twitter posts 🙌. I just need to post some photos and videos so I can make sure it handles those okay, the old approach used a lightbox for photos and could play videos inline.
I'm sick, which obviously means it's time to rebuild wolstenhol.me in Astro, mainly just because my current site won't build anymore due to hitting the max environment variables size limit on AWS/Netlify Functions… I should probably just try and fix that first, right?
Made a cute bit of UI to switch between Adobe Target A/B test experiences in server-side rendered HTML. It's all managed with React Server Components and API calls to save us having to load a tonne of Adobe's third party JavaScript and still suffer layout shift and flicker.
✂️ Support the mission to automate code maintenance and make it more fun by nominating Knip!

Eternal gratitude will come your way uncluttered 🫶

syntax.fm/oss
Similar to what I'm feeling. Never got on with Mastodon (a bit too self-congratulatory) and persevered with Twitter but would much rather be on a better platform if the content/community/audience is there
Section titled Places

Places

A randomised asortment of places I've liked on Foursquare at one point - it could be somewhere from a holiday, or it could be a random bar in Manchester that closed three years ago…

  • Pho Vietnamese

    People talk about pho, great value, casual.

    Charlotte St. (George St.), Manchester

    8 years ago

  • Rudy's

    People talk about pizza, casual, good for dates.

    9 Cotton St, Manchester

    6 years ago

  • ClinkNOORD

    People talk about breakfast food, comfortable, casual.

    Badhuiskade 3, Amsterdam

    5 years ago

  • Anker't

    Budapest, Budapest

    8 years ago

  • Sandinista!

    People talk about great value, casual, croquettes.

    2 Old Bank St, Manchester

    2 years ago

  • Park

    People talk about scenic views, trendy, good for groups.

    Silo da Calçada do Combro, 7º Piso (Calç. do Combro, 58), Lisboa

    8 years ago

  • YES

    People talk about concerts, good for singles.

    38 Charles St, Manchester

    6 years ago

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