Weeknote 47: Computers for ants

Look at that I'm actually writing these on a Friday as I originally intended. The advantages of a quiet Friday after a busy week. A really common pattern I've observed from people writing weeknotes is the aspiration for them to not take that long to write but end up taking 2 hours. That's exacerbated for me by always writing them on Sundays whilst my wife is having a nap. Maybe I should set a timer.

This week

Attended a retro for the cycle just gone. Some tough but useful conversations about dev/design ops and the intensity of this guidelines project as a whole
As an extension to retro, took part in a ways of working learning session that was really great, which itself led into a more broad ways of working sesh for the whole team. That second one was also good but hard. Me and my little group were tasked with mapping out the process of reviewing a piece of work. There's more cognition to deciding to review something than I originally thought!
Took part in a design system developer-wide strategy chat about what we want to ship in GOV.UK Frontend 6.0 plus plans through 6.X to 7.0. Ollie framed it well; 'what problems do we want to solve and how do we solve them as releases' rather than 'what do we want to put in releases'. There's a lot we want to get done, including some super exciting CSS architecture updates. Custom properties coming soon???
Helped run a mini support sesh where me and Ollie helped some non-devs get set up with our repos so that they were able to prototype changes locally and knew how to do so going forward. A neat opportunity to explain some techy concepts and contextualise why we're doing certain things on a 1:1 basis
Chipped away at some lingering snags on the brand guidelines website to fill time and up my peace-of-mind levels. Of particular note I've got a PR in the wings to make our page titles accessible ie: following the format [literal page title] - [section title] - GOV.UK Brand Guidelines
Helped iron out our handover doc for the guidelines website until we revisit it. I think it's ready for now?
Made a teeny tiny change to our filesize-comparison-for-PRs-comment workflow so that the percentage now rounds to one decimal point rather than whole numbers, meaning that a change that adjusts our CSS by say 0.9% no longer rounds to zero which leads to the comment reading 'no changes'
Took part in research being carried out by folks managing the GDS Cabinet Office to DSIT move aka: the Machinery of Government change where I was observed as a technologist doing my work so that they could understand my needs. Did a lot of the above little coding bits in that session. Some interesting question, good engagement with what I do and why. I think I also managed to sell the idea of the design system being open source to them by mistake, teehee
Made a 404 page for this site which it turns out is bloody easy. Try it out!
Went down a very dangerous rabbit hole (for my bank account) researching retro handhelds, which ended in me ordering an Anbernic RG34XXSP
Continued down that rabbit hole even deeper and discoverd the Raspberry Pi Zero W I got as a freebee nearly a decade ago still works, which led to me researching pi projects which then I hope ended again in me ordering a Pi 5

Deeper reflections

There's loads of little stuff I could chat about this week but I am a huge sucker for process so I'm going to talk about the team doing a Planning Sprint (trademark). This is a 2 week version of what we normally call reflection week where we do all our agile ceremonies and planning for the following cycle. This time our leads extended the time to stuff some more things in.

How we do the work

This week was a lot of ways of working chat as mentioned which is kinda intense but I'm hoping will lead to some good results. There's some positive and negative learnings from the brand guidelines work and beyond.

The negative is kinda mundane agile team stuff around granularity of tickets/issues/cards/who cares, those issues being kept up to date, people letting other people know what they're doing and so on. Stuff we've all seen before. The positive is kinda interesting in that it's making time in the calendar to check in and talk through stuff more regularly.

I'm typically averse to more calendar items in my schedule, however something that's worked for us is what we're calling a wildcard meeting where we block out an hour per week ahead of time to talk about whatever needs talking about. We don't have to use it if we don't want to either. This cycle we had 'dev office hours' which were originally intended as a dedicated space for tech support for designers doing in-code prototyping but became more about helping to make decisions and get the work done. The experiment going forward is smaller, more frequent wildcards. Let's see how we get on!

A stylish roadmap

The other main thing was the big tech roadmap. If GOV.UK Frontend 5.0 was more about overhauling our javascript architecture, 6.0 and 7.0 are going to be mostly about our CSS on the tech side. This lines up nicely with what'll be the next iteration of the brand updates where we start using a tweaked colour palette. There's a lot. Mostly CSS and Sass architecture stuff in between more feature-y things.

The big one for us is dropping support for LibSass and Ruby Sass as sass running in favour of the actively supported Dart Sass, which opens the door to richer sass features like use. That itself prompts some questions about CSS browser support and if it's fine to deliver badly styled or even unstyled content to any users still on browsers like IE11, or even lower. It's the usual big can of worms. We'll figure it out and it'll be challenging and interesting, probably, hopefully.

Next week we've got a session that I'm super excited about where we list those feature-y changes I mentioned and figure out what we'd like to do. Whilst I'm quite happy with my tech stuff, it'd be nice for our designers to get to impact iteration of the design system in some shape or form. I also wouldn't mind working on a more traditional feature! We'll almost certainly talk about dark mode again. It's gonna be great.

What is this? A computer for ants???

I thought I'd already had my one-third-life-crisis. Wrong. Welcome to Owen's new special interest: little tiny baby computers.

I've got a retro handheld in the post that looks like a Game Boy Advance SP which runs on linux firmware. I'm pretty excited. Not just because of the games but because of the tech. Getting nerdy about hardware kinda passed me by but retro handhelds which are intended to evoke old, small handhelds but have the chipsets to emulate games that used to run on much beefier hardware (which I would obviously only do legally) may be what ropes me in. Imagine running PS1 games on a tiny screen! So cool!

The retro handheld market itself is also super interesting as a modern day concept because it sprang out of handhelds not really being a thing anymore with the switch followed by the steam deck. We're never going to get small handhelds again, so we have to do it ourselves.

This hobby itself is a risk for my finances, so it doesn't help that investigating retro hardware has brought me back around to the Raspberry Pi Zero W that's been sitting in a drawer since 2017 when I got it as a free gift with a magazine. I never really found a pi project that gripped me but the itch is strong now. I've ordered a camera module and some extra microSDs (you can never have too many!) plus a Pi 5 which was absolutely me getting dazzled by a new toy. I do have this little idea for the 5 to be my weeknotes machine. Right now I'm writing this on my gaming laptop with the thing literally on my lap in my lounge which isn't great WFH hygiene.

A year and change of writing my stupid corporate diary

It clocked this week that I've actually been writing weeknote consistently for over a year! Blimey! I'm a little surprised with myself that I've kept it up considering how much time it takes. This one has taken me like an hour and a half to write.

I feel like I should reflect on it and I do have reflections but I'd like to clean up this site a bit first. Right now it's only weeknotes on here and the index page is a pretty obscene huge list. I've been meaning to paginate them properly. Leave it with me.