Weeknote 35: Big Buzzy BBQ

looks out the window Yep it's still taps-aff season.

This week sure was something. I can't really say I thought about very much else other than the proper launch of the thing I've been working on for the past 6+ months of my professional life. A learning is that climate change UK summer weather does not lend itself to effective get-everything-ready-to-ship style working. Not least of which with all the bloody flies buzzing around my flat, trying to get at my cat's wet food. I've become a real pro with my zappy fly swatter. To any and all big buzzys, buzz into my flat and you will get BBQ'd.

So how did the week go?

  • Deployed shitloads of stuff
  • Had our usual reflection week activities; show and tell plus retro. Planning got nudged to next Monday to give room to do all the deployments
  • Attended a session to map our OKRs for Q2. I'm still rubbish at writing objectives but this was pretty neat. Ended the sesh with a really interesting chat about dark mode, the things we're going to be doing soon that could facilitate it in the future and what a cycle looking at dark mode could look like
  • Ran the reporting tool that Ollie made and talked me through in the week to capture and report brand updates adoption
  • Had a pre-planning chat with my future squadmates about next cycle, notably the reporting tool and how we could iterate it
  • With the rebrand mostly out of my hair, revived an idea to run training with the team on github's info architecture, including how to navigate github and structure your issues to make them easier to navigate
  • Celebrated the release of the brand updates with a game of skribbl with my team and a cheeky pub visit after work

YOU'RE BLUE NOW, THAT'S MY ATTACK

So yeah we updated the website finally. Wednesday was actually quite cathartic. It felt like a collective exhale. I feel lighter. I mentioned above that I've started thinking about team upskilling again which is something I've really wanted to return to but haven't felt like I could for a while. The prospect of moving out of delivery times to peace times is super exciting. I feel like that's when all the cool shit happens because it's when people have the space to get both ideas and notions.

I've been intentionally avoiding reports on the new website by the papers but I have spotted a few takes from my fellow civil servants and design so-and-so's. Something I've learnt about myself is that actually, I don't want to talk about the substance of the thing anymore. The dot, the colour of the dot, the blue of it all. I've had so so so many chats about this over the past year and I'm spent. I apprecaite though that for a lot of folks, this will be the first time they're seeing it. It's interesting seeing that a lot of folks are having the same set of reactions that me and the team did during development.

All that's to say: if you have a take on the rebrand, either don't tell me or keep it to yourself. Thanx.

Back 2 track

I've made a few allusions recently to a measuring tool that Ollie put together to track adoption of the rebrand and I want to talk about it more because it's very cool. It's an implementation of WebPageTest's Bulk Tester which is a google app script to run multiple webpage tests at once and report them to a google sheet. Something neat about WebPageTest is that you can write custom metrics for tests. So for example you could write something to look for pointers in the response html that indicate that a govuk service has applied the brand updates. That's just one example. You could also test for, say, if a service is using service navigation or what version of govuk-frontend it's using.

With the bulk tester, this means you can run a big list of govuk service URL's into the tester and output a big report of metrics for all these services. Have we finally solved design system measurement?!?!?!

Today especially I got really caught up cosplaying a product manager alone in my flat thinking about what a future measurement strategy might be. In particular how the WebPageTest could interact with our last attempt at mass service measurement with our github stats tool (which might not be feasible anymore thanks to some recent github updates). It only increases the flow of brain juices seeing that certified legend Frankie has been doing some thinking about rebrand tracking on his own and made this beast of a service screenshots page.

I could write about this forever so I'll stop myself but I'd love some time in the future to get into this even more. I was saying to Ollie that I think I finally understand how AI freaks feel about the 'potential' of AI. This is what I mean when I say ideas and notions.

Life life life

I've officially stopped lying to myself and have swapped out Portuguese for Japanese. I haven't really been committing to learning Portuguese for a while now so instead of getting caught up in guilt, I'm focusing on Japanese. Ages ago, my brother lent me a book he bought to learn Japanese and finally I have a reason to get into it. It's hard, but hard in a different way that Portuguese is. Portuguese, especially Brazilian Portuguese, has a lot of tricky sounds that are unnatural for a born and bread English boy like me. Japanese is a lot easier to pronounce AND the grammar differences are easier for me to grasp... but it's a whole different alphabet and a more complicated alphabet system. I'll give it my best shot. As long as I can order a beer I'm sure I'll be fine.

I've finally dropped Monster Hunter, which is a bit funny given the last time I mentioned it. I haven't played any games for the last week or so; I just haven't felt in the mood for the monster hunter loop. That's a signal to me that it's time to move on, especially given that the new one is currently not really playable. I made the slightly harrowing call to buy and install 4 new dang games:

All of these have been on my mind for ages and the first 3 I reckon I can get the substance of relatively quickly. That last one from what I hear might be a bit of a time sink. Maybe that can be my new Monster Hunter.