Note 53: Open-sourced feelings
So, last note I said that I wouldn't be doing these weekly and instead do them per cycle, so roughly every 4 weeks to a month. It has been longer than that. Why have I not written anything then? Oh no. Oh jeez. It's another menty health intro.
I had a plan to actually write notes. I was going to turn on my desktop pi where the notes live and write it during the design system team's reflection week between agile-y meetings and odd jobs. At the end of the week I ended up spiraling and spent my non-working Friday recovering from that spiral. I then didn't want to go back in and write this because then I'd have to contend with my own spiral, at least to myself. So I've put it off until now.
I don't want to talk about why I spiraled, really. Although at the same time I acknowledge that part of the one-source nature of doing these notes also means sometimes being open-source with my feelings. Yuck. The summary is that it was sort of an identity crisis, sort of my own self consciousness getting the better of me, sort of me having a breakdown about all the feelings that come from doing my job and working where I work. My analysis so far is that I get drawn into topics and projects that resonate with me, then I can get too drawn in and overload myself, which can also play very badly with deeply rooted anxieties about how I'm perceived. This isn't the first time I've crashed out and it won't be the last. I would like to break the cycle but I haven't figured out how yet. One day maybe I will.
I'm not sure either that a month between notes really works because it's tricky to recall what I got up to and reflect on things more deeply. I'll write out some prose here and then try again next time, whenever the next one of these is. I'll give every 4 weeks/a month another go and see how I get on. I don't really want to stop writing these because I think they are helpful in their own subtle way and others have told me they find them helpful too.
The actual weeknote itself
Last cycle I had a few odd things to work through. Some worthy of reflection, others less so.
There's not much to say about removing deprecated stuff. We deleted some things we said we were gonna delete.
I don't feel like I contributed very much to removing support for LibSass and RubySass over Dart Sass other than reading beeps' RFC-shaped reports and giving a thumbs up. It is still cool that we've done this now as it means sass modules are just around the corner!
Just yesterday I also helped Cal get our new What's New Archive page live. Again, the credit goes entirely to him and Char for actually constructing the page. It's super cool that this is live though. There's a lot of opportunity with this page and how we can help people with upgrading their local code and understanding the work involved in staying up to date.
I've been doing frontend recruitment in between. Some real heavy-hitters this time around. It's been insightful hearing Ollie's thoughts about running a mixed campaign and the pitfalls therein. Looking forward to having more frontend people soon. Not envious of our lead frontenders needing to wrangle offers and interview scores.
You'll have borders around your tags and you'll like it
The first thing I was thrown at was updating our tag design to make them more accessible against the new GOV.UK brand palette, applying Hazal's design from the cycle prior. This involved adding a border around the tag to make it more distinct against white backgrounds and, the bit I was most excited about, applying systemic rules to tags and how they interact with their colours. So tags of a given colour will always have a background of a particular tint of that colour and a text and border colour of ap articular shade of that colour... with outliers, but their documented. It's not the biggest change in the world but I'm quite proud of how the tag's sass came out of this.
This change has been met with a bit of trepidation. The old 'but it looks like a button' critique has reared its head again. I don't actually think there's a way to design around this, not one that I've seen anyway. The previous tag was an improvement on the tag before but not by leaps and bounds. It seems like basically any inline text that doesn't look like plain text is going look like it's interactable to someone. It is a cursed problem.
It does get the brain juices flowing about how the component is architected and presented. The border has actually solved a couple of peripheral design challenges and there's opportunity to iterate I reckon. I wouldn't mind doing a deeper exploration into tags again soon.
The prototype kit section
I'm working on the prototype kit again. Great.
I've become point man for testing frontend v6 against the kit and its sub-packages like common templates. Lots of end-to-end testing, lots of RFC-style report writing, lots of hijacking dev catchup meetings to get opinions and also explain how the kit fits together.
It's a challenging ecosystem to both keep in your head and convey, especially when its not your main project. There's the kit package itself, what gets generated from the kit package when a user generates a new prototype, local generated prototypes which use the kit and finally how all those things interact with plugins. I feel out of breath just writing that out.
As of yesterday though I've got a robust and well reviewed release plan. There's a lot to do but I'm feeling confident we can bash it out. I'm looking forward to putting the kit down again if I'm honest.
A discussions discussion
We've been making greater use of github discussions in recent cycles to get user feedback and gauge community reactions to new stuff and emerging ideas. The format is kind of a reddit clone which is really good for free-flowing forum style chats. The hypothesis is that it's a smaller, faster, easier version of community events to get feedback and engagement on stuff.
So far the results have been both positive and interesting. This is mega content brained but I could write a whole blog post on this. My loose thoughts so far are:
- broadly speaking, yes it's good
- there is a detachment that needs to happen between myself as a design system team member and the work and what is being said about it
- how does one filter out feelings and snap judgments from actual useful data?
- we could really do with a stronger research and analysis limb on the team
- stronger moderation guidance and support is needed, stat
- how do I say "oh my god you are being a huge dickhead about this innocuous work thing you need to calm down" in a constructive way?
This website?!
Despite not doing any writing I did make some nice updates to this website. I've finally set up pre-commits with husky and prettier as well as a linkinator command for link auditing, which is... imperfect for quick local testing but it's still nice to have it.
The root blog page is also now separate from a complete weeknotes page which makes the root page much neater. This is something I've wanted to do for ages but put it off because I assumed I'd have to fiddlearse with 11ty pagination. Turns out just array slicing does the job fine for now!
Culture corner
We went to see Devendra Banhart last month and it rocked. A great performer and good chat. Like a kid's TV presenter for grown-ups. I know he would hate that comment.
I played through Öoo last weekend which is a phenomenal puzzle game. It feels so designed. The loop somehow never got old of presenting 2 branching paths with one that seems like a dead end, going through a series of puzzles that corner you into understanding a new, bizarre sub mechanic of the founding premise of 'caterpillar guy with bombs', then dropping you back at that branching path only for you realise oh, OH, I actually know how to solve this now. It's only a few hours long and cheap as chips so you have no excuse.