Weeknote 43: NTS intellectual

Happy bank holiday weekend. Do something nice with it instead of just reading my weeknote (but read my weeknote first please).

This week:

  • Had the usual reflection week activities. Show and tell, retro, planning etc. Positive feedback and chats re: our airtable work. A few things for me to think about in terms of restraint when presented with a free-form cycle brief like this one.
  • Chatted to one of the brand team folks about the future of the airtable tool, how it can be used right now and how it could feed into wider aims of an accurate, useful, maintained service directory.
  • I've been shuffled over to a different squad working on an MVP of a GOV.UK brand guidelines website so a good chunk of this week was familiarising myself with how the codebase fits together and getting up to speed with how the work has gone so far.
  • Got involved in a few pre-cycle squad sessions including general planning and prioritisation and a ways of working session.
  • Ran an L&D session about GitHub's information architecture; that's how to link up GitHub issues and pull requests to create a web of association and a clear timeline of product history, as well as how to navigate GitHub and a general case for better history keeping. I was a little nervous that it was teaching people how to suck eggs but the feedback was positive so I'm content.
  • Attended an analysis session of chats with our community about our current community offering aka: our events and engagement stuff. A lot of anecdotal hypotheses I had about our community ops were verified in comments, which is good but also means there are some tricky problems to solve. Hopefully will lead to some useful change.
  • Attempted to resolve a minor vulnerability in the prototype kit by upgrading Inquirer and stumbled on upgrading where I failed to check where it was actually being called, the tests also not noticing, and merged a breakage without doing my due diligence. Romaric came to the rescue with some helpful refactoring.
  • Facilitated the launch of GOV.UK Frontend 5.11.2 and ran into a tricky content problem on our website homepage around how we prompt people to use the rebrand whilst also advertising our latest versions. One to figure out... after the bank holly weekend.

DevDesOps

I've been shuffled off getting to muck around in proprietary analysis software and now have ot remember how to be a frontend developer again. I'm coming into this brand guidelines project in the final mile, after some of the pains of figuring out what the thing we actually want is, when the tech and design principals are established and we just have to tidy the thing up before it get's loaded into the chamber to launch.

Romaric and beeps have done some good, interesting work, making use of the freedom to try out new tech (for us). It's an Eleventy site, like this one! They've done quite a lot more than me though in terms of what you can do with Eleventy. I'm not using shortcodes in the really rich ways they've implemented them for example. I'm intimidated but I think once I have a task to do I can hit the ground running.

An interesting piece here is around ops between dev and design. A lot has been put into letting design prototype in code, which is great. The shortcodes as ways to implement unique components like video players and to control grid sizes makes this loads simpler. The designers are all keen to learn as well. The tricky bit is managing time between developers getting their heads down and doing techy stuff and supporting design colleagues with troubleshooting and understanding the trickier bits of CSS. There's an element of guilt tucked in there as well. There are other things too around how the designers themselves balance getting their heads down with sharing work with the team, boundaries of criticism etc.

We've got some ideas to try out this cycle. The most 'radical' one I guess is having a rota amongst the devs to make time for half an hour a day to get on a call and talk through any tech problems. We'll see how it goes. I'm generally in favour of dev/design pairing, time boundaries pending, and this is a chance to flex that. I'm trying to stay conscious that I'm adding another ego into the mix but I think we're all keen to get the work done in the most efficient way possible so I'm feeling optimistic.

All the fings I did this week for fun

I ended up doing bloody loads this week.

Culture vulture

Right after writing last week's 'note I went with some mates to Bridge Command, an 'immersive theatrical experience'. It's basically you and your pals pretending to be the crew of a legally distinct Star Trek ship, with actors. Sort of an escape room sort of not. It was so much fun. Very keen to do it again and maybe opt for a more stressful job than navigator (although shouting out sector names was still a cool time).

If I went again I'd bring my wife along next time, who's more of a 'Trek fan than me. This has ended up prompting us to watch through Star Trek again from the very start with the original series in the 60's. It's so schlocky and silly but so incredible. Shatner hasn't started wearing his girdle just yet but we're getting there.

Between that I've been watching Hajime no Ippo in my alone time. Very simply a fantastic Shonen style anime which actually knows what it's talking about when it comes to boxing. It speaks to a little itch I've been developing to try out combat sports again. I'm not really sure where boxing has come from but it's on my mind. My shoulder still hasn't totally healed from that last jiu-jitsu class and really I should stop being daft and go see a physio. This show is giving me my fix for now though.

On Tuesday me and the missus went to see an indie opera rendition of Sense and Sensibility at the Arcola theatre as part of their Grimeborn opera festival. A very small production with a cast of 6 covering something like 15 characters but still a nice time. The pipes on that lot. Go to your local theatre and support indie productions please.

Finally 2 things on yesterday. Blimey! I went to Rally festival during the day with a load of GDSers and ex-GDSers (the GDS extended universe). Most of the music wasn't for me but it was still a good day out with good folks. It's really nice to go to a smaller, DIY music festival where the volume of dickheads is way lower. Also it wasn't all 'NTS intellectual' style DJs and electronic music. Porridge Radio and MIKE were really great.

I had to leave early though because in the evening I went to see Good Night, Oscar with the missus. Who knew Jack from Will and Grace could bloody go for it as an old pianist with very serious mental health problems? Such an incredible performance. Sean Hayes didn't get that Tony for nothing.

Owen's special music streaming interest update

My little project to move off of Spotify. I've moved on from Deezer to Qobuz and think that's where I'm gonna stay for getting my music. It's the best value for money for a duo account, they do a bunch of neat editorial stuff and they pay artists half-decently. The app can a little fiddly and I'm slightly distrubed that they have 3 artist entries for my beloved É o Tchan, but I'm content with my choice.

For anyone platform-curious who's put off by having to rebuild their library, loads of these platforms partner with transfer services for this very problem. The experience of getting my music from Spotify to Qobuz was very smooth.