Weeknote 37: Double breakfast

I'm feeling well fed after a very indulgent Saturday double breakfast of eggs on toast followed by a slice of cafe cake. It's weeknote writing time.

This week was again a low-sleep week. It was more than the heat I reckon. I had a vet visit for the cat; just a vaccine and a checkup but transporting her on the bus always makes her stressed which makes me stressed. It happens infrequently enough that I don't have the tolerance for it. It's all done now though, plus she's vaccinated and healthy according to the vet.

This is supplemented by me working on some really interesting dev-y things this week. I've been maybe getting too engaged in trying to problem solve. Yesterday I get very into trying to manage some javascript data structures, went for a run at lunchtime, forgot to actually eat anything besides an iced coffee and then gave myself a horrible headache and stomach ache trying to dive back into programming whilst malnourished. I'm writing that not to justify today's big brekkie but as a reminder to myself and others to not be a bellend and actually eat something substantial after you've been for a run in a heatwave!

So this week:

  • Finished auditing all our review app examples and by extension our Percy visual regression test screenshots. The whole setup feels much leaner and more useful. Love a cleanup
  • Investigated applying labels and test cases to Percy to see which is more helpful. We've gon with labels. Percy's review UI doesn't play well with both. If anyone knows someone who works for Percy please send them my way I have extensive critiques to level at them.
  • Got together in the GDS London office with Ollie and Brett to mob on rebuilding our WebPageTest brand refresh adoption reporting tool in Airtable
  • Revisited our pull request performance reporting, which is how I get a headache yesterday. Whoops! I've done a lot of restructuring of the filesize data we retrieve so that we can do stuff like adding percentage changes per pull request and not reporting on stuff that's not changed. Feeling good about it, small as it may be in the grand scheme of things.

Our service data in up in the air

We procured Airtable almost a year ago after an investigation into how we could better record known services and use them as analysis points. It's a sort of low-code data management platform with some power user features for automation. It's been used a bit by our leads but not by the team at large.

Using it as a levelled up version of our reporting tool, which being honest is currently just an experimental google app script and spreadsheet provided by WebPageTest, was Ollie's idea who was hoping we could try out those power user features to get more out of our reporting for both the brand rollout and for us going forward. I'm talking relational databases. I'm talking scheduled job dispatches. I'm talking advanced action triggering. All the good shit.

Owen's unbiased review: It's bloody good! Airtable is surprisingly powerful. It can do quite a lot with it's automation and what can trigger it. It's script editor is also one of the best browser editors I've ever seen. It has autocomplete! And types! TYPES!

We've parked it for now but we're hoping to revisit it within the next 3 months to finish it. I'm also hoping that by presenting what we've done to the team that it'll spark some imagination about what we could do in terms of reporting or measuring our work, which has always been historically tricky.

Liferino

I mentioned I haven't been sleeping great. I had a go at doing some data gathering using my heart monitor but I think it hinders more than it helps at the moment. I need to figure out a place for it that doesn't feel weird to sleep with and where I can't see the blinky light. The data I get back is useful and interesting all the same so it'd be nice to figure it out.

On Wednesday I went to Tofu Vegan with some chums. I have to remind myself often that vegan food is actually capable of being very tasty. This was a pan-Chinese thing and it rocked. Proper spicy. Proper flavourful.

Just this morning I finished Arctic Eggs finally. They made a cooking game weird and fun. Can you fry eggs on Mt Everest? I'm gonna move onto Mouthwashing and I'm a little afraid too. A game that opens with the text 'I hope this hurts' on a blank screen can only be a certain number of experience types.