Weeknote 39: Squealy guitars

Woe is me I wasn't very well this week. Took Monday and Tuesday off and divided my time between bed and the loo. I'm not a medical professional so this is undiagnosed but research suggests that I food poisoned myself. I let some chicken thaw in the fridge and then left it for a pretty sketchy 4 days before eating it. I'm writing this out as a reminder to myself and my instinct to not waste food that sometimes you've not planned your weekly meals properly and you need to give it up.

I'm feeling lots better now. Well enough to write a weeknote. For this short week, what did I do?

  • Finished off lingering bits from last cycle:
    • Updating our docs on our Percy setup
    • Merging the change itself to get percentage differences on our file sizes (yippee!)
  • Did a spot of planning for next cycle. We're gonna be working on productionifying the Airtable spike we did some weeks ago which is pretty exciting
  • Observed but didn't get directly involved in our dependabot setup finally start working again after being dodgy for a month or so now and gleefully merged a few dependabot PRs. Credit to Ollie, Brett and Github support for sorting this
  • Scratched an itch from ages ago to get a check-external-links command working on the design system website which I'm hoping will enable us to more easily do content auditing in the future. Lots of trying to get build caching working in github actions which I'm feeling more equipped to deal with following last cycle's stats comment cache management work
  • Sorted some bits out for a quick prototype kit release next week
  • Had a chat with Ollie really briefly about his thinking so far on design tokens. It's very early days yet but there's some neat stuff we could do. In particular Style Dictionary looks really cool

A tiny deeper reflection on the work I've been doing recently

I don't feel like I've been doing lots of proper frontend frontend work recently like getting into styling and UI building and accessibility tech. Ollie one time described my work on release automation as 'site reliability engineer shaped'. I've been in the CI and the tooling and the scripting of it all for a little while. I don't think that's strictly not frontend as most devs across the industry will be asked to do all number of things outside their specialism but I also don't know if I've been really doing my specialism.

And... I like it! I'm worried sometimes that I'm doing a bad job because as I say it's not my specialty but it's neat to learn more about. I've figured out that I learn by doing more than anything. I think I'm still content calling myself a frontend developer even if I'm dipping into work outside the frontend of the frontend. My educational background is in game programming which is about as software-developer as you can get which is a reminder that I did get into this for programming and template building and style wrangling doesn't always scratch that itch. I'm sure when I get around to it again I'll write some bollocks about how much I missed it.

Owen's week on the sofa

Whilst I was ill I started re-watching the first season of Delicious in Dungeon as a little comfort to get me through the hurty tummy. It still holds up, unsurprisingly. It's exactly my sort of thing: really well animated food preparation. I might go digging around for the manga next.

Favourite artist from last year BODEGA released a new EP as fake band NOEDGA: Rot in Helvetica. It's a hardcore punk album whereas BODEGA are an art punk band (which is VERY DIFFERENT) which is why they decided to create the fake band for the separation I guess. I've listened to the band speak about their reverence for the music scene in New York and how these different genres wax and wane and this feels like a tribute to that. It's heavy and angry and has a lot of squealy guitars. Music for Owen.

Yesterday, now that I was better, we went out for breakfast at Akub in Notting Hill, an incredible Palestinian restaurant if you have the minerals to travel all the way to Notting Hill. Delicious posh middle eastern food. The short rib fatteh was very special. It's Notting Hill so it's not cheap but highly recommend.