Weeknote 49: Frankly obscene pizza

And... start. I'm timing this as a little exercise to see if it helps me be more succinct in my weeknote writing. At the very least I'll have a better idea of how long doing these actually take me. I would like to hurry up and get this online because I wanted to make a cake ahead of the weekend. Let's see how we get on.

This week

Acted as a technical person/extra pair of hands for the design system designers to audit our components against the new brand. Lots of cataloguing our colours and finding outliers and mapping old stuff to new stuff and thinking about consistencies and writing up findings in docs
Made a prototype of the new palette for the updated brand, including a new sass colour system for prototyping by designers
Attempted to prioritise and apply improvements to govuk-frontend's review app that could enable the designers to more efficiently audit stuff but didn't flipping get anywhere. It turns out a lot of what'd be useful opens a can of worms. I managed to make some teeny tiny changes that better documents link states. Better than naff all!
Did a little bit more tech setup help for my non-tech colleagues
Filled out some feedback forms and booked end-of-quarter reviews for my own line reports
Uhh... I lost my work phone at the office. Specifically I left it on my desk and went to lunch and I guess someone thought it was lost and handed it in. Thankfully I'm all recovered but this is a reminder to me not to be so casual with my property in civil service offices, or anywhere
Went to Mum's Pizza in Stratford for Brazilian pizza to help my wife with a bout of homesickness. If you're in the area it's worth a visit, even if it is frankly obscene what those Brazilians are putting on their pizzas. Having said that Catupiry is on of their finest inventions and is inspired as a pizza topping.
Not unrelated to the above, went to the Jazz Cafe on Sunday to see a celebration of the work of Tim Maia. If you're going to listen to any Brazilian music it's gotta be this guy. One of the all time great Brazilian soul artists. I strongly recommend Nobody Lives Forever as a start. The performance was absolutely cracking. The artists and the crowd all having a good time.
Replayed VVVVVV on my anbernic. Still good, still bloody hard. This time I accepted defeat and skipped doing things the hard way.
Installed an SSD plus an adapter HAT on my desktop Pi 5. I'm writing these notes via a OS booted from that very SSD right now. It was fiddly but fun to put it together. Feel like a real computer wizz.

Deeper reflections

Ok that took me 28 minutes so if this section takes me another half hour that's a nice neat hour. Although I keep typing like I'm on a mac when I'm on linux and it's a bother so I'm gonna get my click clacky windows keyboard instead.

Colour consistency

So I've been put on a squad with all the designers. It sort of feels like a reversal of the model I'm more used to where there are more devs and one designer. We have half a cycle, so a week and change, to do an audit of govuk-frontend against the updated colour palette as part of the ongoing brand updates to GOV.UK. Next week we'll review where we're at and start thinking about doing some of this stuff, which might require us to rejig the squads.

What's the new palette? Besides adjustments to our primary colours like our green and red, it also applies a system of tints and shades to those colours. Every colour has their primary central colour code with 25%, 50% and 80% instances in either direction, with some extra per colour. Is it the best colour system ever? Eh, question mark. I do like that it makes our colour system more... systemic and gives us affordance to be more systemic with our recommendations.

For example, we found that there's some hidden shaded colours in our palette for hover states of green things like buttons and the success links in the notification banner. The answer? Have all these colours be the 50% shade of the green for their hover state and make a rule that all hover state colours use that thing's base colour's 50% shade. So if we make a purple thing with a hover state, the colour at least of that hover state is going to be purple. That opens the door to constructing sass mixins that return a consistent hover state based on a base colour you pass it because we know that all our colours will use the same tint and shade mappings. Hell yeah!

It's been quite fun being more consultant-shaped and I think by next week we'll have a solid list of recommendations. There's currently a reasonable degree of chaos in our colours, most through stuff tucked away behind random tinting and shading. Reducing the chaos and having rules is very cool.

Slow progress

Whilst I've enjoyed the week, I do feel like I've not gotten that much done. Mostly this comes from me starting possible improvements to our review app to help with the audit and realising that they're much bigger jobs than can be done easily in the space of a week. I haven't done nothing but through the specific lens of better enabling designers to audit stuff, I don't feel like I've not been much help.

Part of this I think comes from the time frame. I'm so used to working on a 3 week cycle that I got over-ambitious whilst at the same time the tighter 1-week timeframe makes me feel like there's almost no point in starting anything. These review app things that the designers have wish-listed are all useful but maybe they're better suited to their own cycle. Depending on what we end up doing next, I/we might get a chance to work on these with a bit more space.

I have to remind myself again that I haven't just been sitting on my hands all week. I've been discussing, consulting, getting very engaged with the design strategy of it all. It's sometimes difficult to recall that when it's not articulated tickets moved across a kanban board.

AND TIIIIIIME

That took me a flat hour, including editing. Not bad. I think the timing helped to keep me on task. More brevity feels like something to aim for though. I'm calling timing myself writing these a success.