Note 52: Get the week out

Is Owen going to have 3 crash out weeks in a row???

No he's not. Feeling a lot more stable this week. Less like I'm vibrating. A week of reflection is good for that.

What else helps is that I'm doing these weeknotes early cause I have a half day today thanks to some built up flexi from this week and last. I feel like I should do something with the time, other than write weeknotes, but also honestly I'm quite looking forward to just sitting on the sofa. I've already been for a run today so my activity conscience is clear.

I should get used to it cause from next week I'll be trying out compressed hours. 2 weeks working longer with every other Friday off. Prepare to get even less out of the design system team on Fridays. It's longer hours but I've been noticing that if I add up time peeping at my work phone or thinking about stuff it kinda lines up with how much work I'm doing anyway. Maybe now I'll be able to finish all those Raspberry Pi project ideas. Pi-hole, you are in my sights.

Notices

Messing with the format again because I want to highlight some stuff up top.

Weeknote ops

Along with changing my hours, I also want to try out changing how often I write these. I'm gonna drop down to once a month, or rather once every 4 weeks to line up with the design system team's rhythm of work. Get the week out doesn't have the same ring to it.

I think the idea of notes in some shape or form is valuable and in the spirit of working in the open and folks have mentioned to me that they find these useful. However I don't think the schedule is working for me. I feel less like I'm reflecting and more like I'm doing it because I have to. I've done some work to try to stop it becoming a total chore like setting a rule not to do it on the weekends anymore but even with that I don't know if the 1 week rhythm is sustainable.

Let's see how we get on with me doing them in the team's dedicated reflection week, when I'm supposed to be, uh, reflecting. I don't know if them becoming longer or less specific is a risk or not.

One other related thing: I'd like to also stop posting these on linkedin because linkedin is shit and I don't want to be on it any more than I need to be. Instead you can either follow my RSS feed or follow me on bluesky. I'm quite a lot more candid and less work chat-y there as a heads up. Please let me know if there's anyone for whom not posting on linkedin will be an issue. I doubt it because I think like 3 people read these but just in case.

Just try it

Also wanted to call out specifically that we published a pre-release of GOV.UK Frontend 6.0.0. This isn't the final version but an alpha/beta type release where we put out what we're planning 6.0.0 to look like and gather feedback. It also gives people a chance to judge how a new breaking release will impact them.

If you're reading this and you work on a uk government service, please try it out and drop us some feedback. We can't make things good if you don't tell us so.

This week

  • Had our usual reflection week activities. I'm zeroing in here on retro where we got into some really good chats about recording decisions and in-team leadership.
  • Had my second quarter performance review. Moving to DSIT means using their performance framework which isn't tied to any sort of pay award and is more tuned to addressing poor performance rather than rewarding good performance. I'm on the fence about this as an operational choice but what it did mean is that the performance review meeting with my line manager was a lot more low-key. Mostly going through team feedback. Lots of nice comments and a few behaviors to think about and try to improve. Yes ok I'll try to yap less, I'LL TRY
  • Attended a great L&D sesh with Cal our content designer or writing in plain English. Very good explainer on how to make communication less bullshit-y which I'm still pondering. We got a lot into active voice. I think I finally understand it (with monkeys)
  • Got into planning for the following cycle. I will be helping on 2 squads which are doing many things:
    • Firstly I'll be both helping to remove deprecated features and think about how we apply the policy change to remove support for LibSass and RubySass as implementations over Dart Sass. I'm expecting deprecations to be nice easy flow-state work whilst the policy change is more thinky. Sass implementations is a bit of a gap in my tooling knowledge so it'll at the very least be a learning experience.
    • Follow up on the colour work done last cycle by providing tech support for some specific discoveries into button legibility and implementing some of these discoveries ahead of 6.0
  • 'Drove' the 6.0 pre-release. I'm pleasantly surprised by how streamlined our release process is now and how little improvements like automating common bits of content no longer feels like a daunting ask
  • Sifted a whole load more frontend CVs
  • Finished the original series of Star Trek, made it through all the original series films over the weekend and have now started next gen. That first film is a slog but Wrath of Khan? Voyage Home? Even Undiscovered Country? Chef's kiss. Also I love how Picard isn't this all American hero; he's just a hard-nosed old bastard who hates kids. Incredible.
  • Went to see Tennis for their last show ever!! Very emotional, very good. A really touching farewell. They brought Matt Berry on stage for one song, not for some special thing but because they needed a spare keyboard player. What the fuck??
  • Grouted my kitchen tiles. Then reinforced my bathroom light fixture and grouted that as well. I am a living god.

Deeper reflections

What are we doing again?

A benefit of more of the team being better upskilled on our operational systems like github means that more people are able to notice and articulate stinks in our processes. For example, all the designers on the team engaged really well with popping write-ups of their discoveries on github issues which is GREAT. However what it's now led to is a conversation where those same designers are asking: where do we put decisions? Is recording them in the comments of github issues that then disappear into the void of our repos the right call? Should we put them somewhere more central?

This has been a mini theme this week. I've had a few stellar conversations with folks about how we communicate stuff, how we keep the team afloat of chats and ideas and plans happening at all the different levels, how the team can feed into wider decision making more or even be aware of it, etc etc etc. A thing that comes to my mind now is the target audience. We've got our external, open-first record where I think it's fine to take time to think about what we write before we write it. Then there's our internal record where we put ideas, decisions about what we're thinking of working on and why. We have both of these in part but they're not perfect.

What this speaks to is the desire for order over chaos. I was thinking this week that it feels like the design system is healing, to coin an incredibly lame turn of phrase. We've been in this period of chaos for basically a full year with the brand updates overtaking our delivery and the programme move still impacting our ability to get on with things meaningfully. Now it finally feels like we're getting a degree of order back. We're working more on our library and systems again which I am so so so happy about. With that added clarity comes the ability to see more chances to make things better and clearer, so lets do it! We'll see what happens. There are some cool things to try out.