Difficult second season

After a 2 year hiatus, where I haven’t written one of these, I’m taking the advice of the prolific Jukesie who suggested weeknotes as a gateway drug to the underworld of interesting and considered blogging.

According to my done.txt file, I logged a few links to look at - I don’t have a fancy system, I just bung em in my todo.txt file.

Gerry McGovern’s Article about testing with the customer rang very true - both when thinking about the wider organisation I work in, and for me personally. More testing has been on my list for a long time, and I need to make proper steps to build it in.

Also had a quick look at the CSS Tricks article on Design Systems which though a pretty quick overview of their process, did contain some good pointers and some useful links.

I had a brief look at Sarah Drasner’s impressive codepens - reminding me to get more into Codepen

Most of my effort this week has gone into a seemingly simple design for a list of events combined with a select to choose dates. It was enjoyable to design around variations in content like title, description, sometimes info not being present and multiple options. I enjoyed the challenge of making the information clear and useable, and hopefully it’ll work well with the rest of the site it’s on. Even if it did throughly obey Hofstadter’s law

The team also had a big meeting where lots of interesting things like workflows, standard and expectations were discussed in relation to our work in support and development. I was an enthusiastic advocate of Github issues as I’m a big fan. I think the little extra work of creating and maintaining them will be well worth it - if done the extra information about all the work that comes in and how we deal with it will give us a good picture of how we’re working, which I think is a crucial first step to working better.

Also the usual set of little support issues, that take a surprising amount of time - especially for someone as easily distracted as me.

I also worked out that I find it really hard to work on more that one screen. The whole, laptop plugged in to a larger monitor thing is hard. Pathetically, I can’t seem to get past the horrible aesthetics of all those cables and bits of hardware not lining up.