Weeknote 44: Pão francês
Happy end of August. I guess it's not very happy if you're a summer fan. I'm a bit sad that it's starting to get cooler and cloudier but also honestly I am looking forward to the flat not being uncomfortably hot and the downstairs flats not having parties all the time. I promise I am cool, I'm not a nimby all the time.
So this week then:
- Made a start on cleaning up prototype code our designers put together for the brand guidelines MVP. Lots of organising sass, converting common patterns that have emerged into shortcodes and generally cleaning up implementations to be production ready
- Looked through a big site wide assessment of the guidelines in their current form by the designers and converting some things to do into sensible tech tasks based on what they reckon requires some dev intervention and made a little start
- Reviewed some draft sketches by designers on a more 'designed' landing page format and a redesign of the colour pages to make them less insufferably long
- Continued ironing out ways of working with the rest of the squad. There were a lot of interesting chats about how to track bits of work across different tools and when it's appropriate to leave github. Also prompted some things about my little off-to-the-side aim to upskill the team on git and github and different learning styles. Lectures may not be the be-all and end-all, despite digital gov and the tech world at large pushing that narrative
- Had a little after work social with some people on the team. Played a very intense game of jenga and had a very intense Argentinian BBQ dinner at Bife afterwards
I make website
I was a little worried going into this cycle since 1. my impression of the work was that it's been a bit of a slog and 2. I need to get up to speed with a whole new codebase and get moving on stuff. However so far it's been a pretty positive experience. The tech isn't that complex. It's an 11ty static site; not exactly pushing the tech envelope, so hitting the ground running has been fairly easy.
It's also been quite nice to make frontend stuff again, especially with a 'fresher' project where we don't have to worry quite as much about the theoretical impact to every service in government. On Friday I was converting an svg into responsive html. Crazy! It's also been a conscious choice to test out some frontend concepts that are a struggle to prototype on the design system because of it's aforementioned impact. That's part of why it's an 11ty website for one example. For another I'm learning how CSS grid works finally!
I'm grateful to have a project with a lot of tech tasks that involve either cleanup or construction and getting the space to just wade through them. Thanks beeps for patiently answering my questions and reviewing my bits.
A little reflection on talks
Gather around everyone. Owen has a spicy take.
During a ways of working chat, it got raised that some non-techy team members are still struggling with specific github features. I was taken aback by this since some of this I covered just the week prior in an L&D session on the topic until someone pointed out that it's tricky to retain all this info and it'd be good if it was also written down somewhere. Somewhere in my brain, some gears click into place.
I think I've fallen into a cultural trap. GDS loves talks. It promotes public speaking, lectures, workshops etc as it's main knowledge sharing mechanism and career progression mechanism. The latter is fair enough, the civil service do be like that, just or not. I'm skeptical of the former though. If I think back to the talks I've attended outside of smaller internal community meetings I really struggle to think of, well, any one of them where I actually learnt something or even found them interesting. A take I've heard is that most meetup tech talks are for the speaker, not the audience.
My failing is that I've done exactly that. This little tech upskilling project, is it for me or is it for my team? Maybe right now it's more for me and my corporate objective to get a nice performance score at the end of the financial year than it's for my colleagues. I'm gonna revisit how I'm approaching this right now. I reckon the answer isn't just talks/workshops but also some written down stuff to supplement it. Maybe even documentation that has a recording of the talk on it? I'll figure it out eventually.
Not work
For the bank holly Monday we went to the Tate Britain to see an exhibition on Edward Burra. Really cool, vibrant, sort of surreal stuff that becomes more melancholy as he gets closer to the end of his life. This is a common pattern I've seen with artists that they get sadder and more introspective over time and it reflects in their art. I wonder if that's just a person thing, not an artist thing. Anyway we had Brazilian food in Vauxhall after and rolled home.
The Brazilian food doesn't end there. Yesterday morning we sussed out Angel's Bakery north of Stokey which is an excellent Brazilian caff. I didn't think we'd be able to find proper pão francês in London. Moving out of the area is now going to be an impossible challenge.
I've been making my way through the new Clipse album Let God Sort 'em Out. I don't know Clipse that well but I do know Pusha T, the rapper who raps like he's somewhere in your house and you don't know which room (quip stolen from a youtube comment), so I'm predisposed to enjoy this. I've dragged my feet on the album but Chains & Whips is one of the best songs I've heard this year. Kenny's line on people wanting the tea on him, well here's the ginger root is bonkers.
Finally I forgot to say I finished reading Delicious in Dungeon. The shift away from food towards the end is a bummer but it's got this really interesting, kinda somber ending that touches on desire and special interests and what they mean. I think I'll be turning it over in my brain for a little while.