Weeknote 51: Double crash out

I just saw the start of last week's note where I say I'm sparked out. That makes 2 weeks in a row. Bloody hell.

I thought about skipping this week but wondered if there's value in me to get my thoughts out. I've been doing too much deep thinky work this week, probably when I don't necessarily need to be. That's led to me crashing out now. That's not the best trend to notice.

I was thinking today about how much feeling I'm putting into my work and the impact on my wellbeing. I do care quite a lot about this team and the product and things being as good as they can possibly be and hang a lot of my worth on that. I feel like I'm starting to let it go too far. Either things go my way, which isn't an end point because the work is iterative and there's always more to do; or they don't in which case I take it personally.

I can see on principal that this isn't a good thing but I'm struggling to know how to not care about the work so much. I think I've always had this problem in some shape or form. I need to change some variables, or figure out how to convert some constants into variables, or discover new variables.

On the plus side I'm back up to scratch on my exercise. 2 weight routines and a run today. Exercise has it's own risks of scoreboard mania but it does defrag my brain. Helps me think through the sort of stuff I'm writing today.

This week

I won't do any deeper reflections this week I'll just do what happened.

  • Paired on a first pre-release of 6.0 aka: 6.0.0-beta.0. It's not out yet but it's going to include:
    • replacing the old colour palette with the new one, meaning there are now a stricter group of core colours with tints and shades either side of the 'primary' variant
    • automatic re-mapping of the old palette onto the new one based on a manual exercise the designers did last week, plus a sass warning advising you change your use of govuk-colour to just use the remapped colour
    • removing public access to the $govuk-colours variable that previously allowed folks to change that colour map. No more. It's our stuff or roll your own.
    • 'deactiviting' govuk-tint and govuk-shade, meaning they just return what's passed to them with no alterations along with a sass warning.
  • Provided some tech opinions and some light design opinions on a pair of investigations into reworking our tag designs to account for the new colours to make them more legible and explore rounded corners on buttons (RELAX, IT'S A GOOD IDEA)
  • Helped draft the 6.0.0-beta.0 release notes, which is harder than it sounds
  • Helped sift CVs for the frontend developer recruitment campaign. Oh btw we're hiring! Tell your frontend developer friends please
  • Filled out feedback forms for my teammates. Nearly done, hopefully
  • Caught Steve in the London GDS office between him hobnobbing with i.AI for a very nice catchup and update on how the team's been faring since he ran off to do some property planning rubbish
  • Managed to affix my bathroom light thanks to my new best friend Gorilla Glue tape. I have some grey caulk and a very fancy caulking tool now so that's gonna be my weekend
  • Tried getting UFO 50 to run on my Anbernic via PortMaster but failed. The retro handheld hobby still eludes me. Pretty sure it was either a wifi issue or the fact that a patch of UFO 50 came out just yesterday as I tried it so I'll give it another go next week
  • Listened to Marian Sena's new album Coisas Naturais. It's good!