Weeknote 48: Floaty mouse

Writing these today from the Raspberry Pi on my desk! Something worthwhile came from that ongoing special interest I guess. I appreciate being able to swap inputs from my work mac to my funny little computer rather than have my gaming laptop on my lap in the living room. Surprisingly easy to setup as well. Glad especially to have fixed the weird floaty mouse issue.

This week

  • Took part in a small series of workshops, firstly to get our 'wishlist' of things that are worth doing or exploring and then taking them and start building a high level delivery roadmap from now, through GOV.UK Frontend 6.0 all the way to 7.0. Some cool and interesting chats and ideas. I banged the drum for dark mode and a language picker component
  • As part of the above roadmap series, took the tech roadmap we did last week and plotted it to the final 3 cycles of the year with the dream to release 6.0 either end of 2025 or in Jan 2026. There's a lot to do but it feels doable
  • Released new versions of GOV.UK Frontend and the Prototype Kit. The latter continues to be a huge pain to release because the script used to release it via a developer's local machine won't stop failing at the point it tries to publish to npm. Keen to strip it all out in favour of CI workflows like we have for Frontend. Anyway upgrade or I'll belt ya one.
  • Attended a playback of user research on service patterns in government, including what the bloody hell they are, by Imran and Katrina. The conclusion: we sort of know what they are (working definition is that they're common tasks that a user has to do in their life, one level up from the digital services themselves, that might require one or more digital services) but people are using them and defining them inconsistently so it's not just us who's behind lol. I continue to be bothered that people keep co-opting the word 'pattern' for everything in design that doesn't already have a singular descriptive name. It's like me calling web servers "web architecture patterns". Get better at naming things please.
  • Helped outwith another sesh where we got non-techies on the team setup with some of our repos for local prototyping and self-serving with git and pull requests. This time I got to teach our tech writer what vim is, which was kinda fun but also underlines how ridiculous being a developer is.
  • Continued chipping away at odds and ends in the brand guidelines website. Mostly little code snags and cleanup of prototype code from design things like asset optimisations. I bashed out a whole load of stuff this morning which was very serene.
  • Attended a GDS Frontend Community Away Day which was a lot of fun.
  • Went to see Cate La Bon at Rough Trade East which was absolutely great
  • Made an absolute fool of myself by, after avoiding buying the Pi 5 starter kit over 'only the things I need', discovering I do in fact need everything in it and losing out on the savings I thought I was making. Need to remember to read the product description.

Deeper reflections

The road to 6.0

There's no big '6.0-mania' sign for me to point to sadly but we are on the road to the next major release. We had originally started planning this around the beginning of the year but the brand updates work threw that to the side. Now finally we've been able to plot that course all the way to 7.0 which is exciting.

The missing piece is still the design side, so 'feature' stuff like new components, changes to our design systems etc. We've all got ideas but the design arm of this team has been so delivery focused for so long that there hasn't been a chance to do any sort of discovery or in some cases even acclimatise with the state of the design system in its current form. We're doing lots of CSS stuff on the tech side so there are opportunities to line some of this stuff up. Feels like there's an education piece, or maybe even just a 'space to muck around' piece?

Next cycle I've been plonked in with the designers to provide tech assistance on assessing the new colour palette, which is the next big iteration of the rebrand going into 6.0. I'm hoping I can upskill folks on mapping this stuff to the technical release procedure and myself think about how it could map onto upcoming CSS work. Hopefully that'll open the door to more confidence with planning features. I really wish we had more cohesive, confident mapping in our features, more 'we will explore xyz in abc quarter' etc, so any sort of move towards that is grand in my book.

Frontend Olympics 2025

There was a community away day yesterday and it was pretty great. I feel like I very rarely interact with other frontenders at GDS these days so a big get together felt very refreshing. We learnt a lot from Martin about Baseline and GOV.UK Frontender Ash's frontend olympics activity was a laugh, even if it did expose how little I know about http headers and how bad all of us are at basketball.

We went to Dishoom for lunch which was obviously grand, even if some of the London vets who read these notes will argue otherwise (get over yourselves it's GOOD. I don't give 2 fucks if it's not authentic south Asian or if it's hard to get a booking IT'S ON LOADS OF TIMEOUT LISTS FOR A REASON). I managed to successfully sell the cheese naan to some of the new-comers.

Then for the big outing we went to Google London's Accessibility Discovery Centre. This is my second time visiting the ADC so I had a rough idea of what to expect but they've added more stuff! As well as the already neat things that were there like the accessible games, early examples of accessibility and how they map to phones and accessibility features within Google Assistant, the guide also showed off some really cool stuff like they're BSL video translator. The big ones were how they're using Gemini in accessibility stuff which I continue to be skeptical of but what they guide showed were at least interesting if not exciting. The TalkBack feature that tells you how many faces are in a camera frame and uses motion to auto-take a photo seems really good, with the caveat that it's AI so it's a bother at least for people like me.

I appreciate as well how candid our guide was about accessibility in Google. It sounds like it's the same constant battle for relevance and engagement that it is in government (and it's supposed to be the law over here!).

Tiny computer special interest update

My wife today made a comment about how many Raspberry Pi branded boxes were in our pile of recyclables that didn't fit in the recycling bin...

I am continuing to learn, make mistakes and literally pay for those mistakes. There are a few things that come with any hobby that aren't always written down in the most obvious place, if at all, that you need to bump into yourself to learn. For example did you know: if you get a Pi 5 with the Pi 5 case and a low profile heatsink, the clip holding the fan that comes with the case will bump up against the heat sink and won't close. So much for 'low profile'. My solution which I'm really proud of is to turn the fan clip upside down.

It's starting to veer more towards me purchasing extra bits because I want to rather than because I've gotten the wrong part. It feels a lot like previous attempts to get into building my own computers, this time at an easier-to-understand (and much less expensive) scale. It remains fun. I do like my little '5. I got paid today so I'm going to try and just order everything I've been thinking about getting rather than in dribs and drabs to try and manage the browsing.