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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…

Tweets from Twitter, 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 house, bubblegrunge, london indie, electro-pop francais, anthem emo and uk hip hop 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: 20 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: 26

    Tagged location: Electric Castle

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

  • Likes: 18 Comments: 3

    Tagged location: Glastonbury Festival

    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

    Tagged location: Glastonbury Festival

    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: 24 Comments: 3

    Tagged location: Playa Kašjuni

    Happy birthday to @marley.rude! 🥳

  • Likes: 69 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: 38 Comments: 4

    Tagged location: University of Liverpool

    #LivUniGrad (for @marley.rude !)

  • Likes: 29 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

  • Likes: 31 Comments: 1

    Tagged location: Wadi Mujib

    Having just about recovered from the million steps we did across two days at Petra (and one evening of Petra by candlelight) I was ready to do a bit of canyoning-lite at Wadi Mujib which is a part hike, part canyoning, part via ferrata up a canyon (wadi) using ropes, ladders, and walking up to a nice double waterfall, then climb/jump/slide/float back down. On the way down you can float on your back and look up at the lovely sandstone rock formations and patterns. This was my last Jordan activity, now I'm just abusing the happy hour at the W hotel back in the capital after a week away from non-Arabic country levels of access to alcohol!

  • Likes: 30

    Tagged location: Dead Sea Beach (Holiday Inn Resort)

    Obligatory Dead Sea floating and mud photos! The most fun I've ever had at a Holiday Inn (probably)!

  • Likes: 45 Comments: 1

    Tagged location: Petra, Ma`An, Jordan

    Went to Petra, saw some rather old things, got offered a million donkey rides! Props to the Bedouin guy who took the first photo and had clearly done this a million times before!

Section titled Tweets and toots*

Tweets and toots*

Tweets and toots (*I know they're not meant to be called that anymore) by me, @philw_ and/or @philw_@hachyderm.io.

I got some Primaloft (synthetic down insulation) slippers and MY GOODNESS they're warm. They're also the most Outdoorsy Dadcore thing I've ever bought, which is quite something given that I construct a whole new tent lighting system and merino sock portfolio each festival season.

There are 4 more of these (!) I thought I'd save you some scrolling, but if you want you can…

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…

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