Look at that, I made at least one!
This week feels like it's flown by. Quite a lot has happened, especially for a week where I was hoping to take things easy after Design System Day last week. It doesn't help that the residual summer warmth has finally left the city. All it took was one very rainy Sunday and it's now dark when I wake up. I've got my jumper on and coffee in hand (more on that later). Let's jot the week up.
The theme for my squad this cycle is continuing to address the DAC audit of the Design System website, and see if we can make things more accessible along the way. The 2 main aims we have for this are:
Cal, our content designer, has been busy this week planning an audit of the website to address the issues in aim 1 and beyond. I'm very happy to have him involved in this and I think he is as well. Whilst it's not head down content writing work, Cal sees content issues in our guidance that he'd like to fix but just not right now the same way the devs see tech debt as we traverse our codebases. The difference is that there are 5 devs on the Design System team at large and one content designer, 2 at a stretch if you count our tech writer. An opportunity to raise the quality of our content in general I'm hoping will be rewarding for both of us. I'm in particular excited about some of the technical things we could do as part of this, notably opportunities to automate some of the issue identification.
The other aim is much trickier. There are a few known accessibility issues we've listed that we want to fix but the root of the issue is coming from the vendor, not us. Any solution we make is likely to be complex and risks tipping the scale into over-providing and making GOV.UK Frontend needlessly weighter, subtly degrading the experience of all users. We're going to try coming at these with fresh faces and a bit more fervor, by which I mean we're planning to go directly to the vendors themselves and try to more firmly request that they fix these problems, on top of looking at enhancements. We're early days but I anticipate the remaining 2 weeks is going to be a lot of researching, a lot of trying out whacky ideas, a lot of assistive tech testing.
As a carryover from last cycle, we also released a new version of the accessible autocomplete and the govuk country and territory autocomplete to address a few accessibility issues raised by DAC on our site search, which uses the accessible autocomplete. These 2 components always make me a bit uncomfortable because they're zombie packages. What I mean by this is that they are both still downloadable as packages, they are both in use by people across digital gov but neither of them are actively maintained. It's not uncommon to see a user show up on our team support and make a feature request for one of these that would really help out their service, only for us to wring our hands and say sorry, no can do, you're on your own. This isn't helped by something I heard quipped in a meeting recently that the general opinion in digital gov is that the accessible autocomplete is still considered the standard for autocomplete-esque UI elements that are both reasonably well built and also accessible. Grimace emoji...
We have a plan to retire these and in fact build the autocomplete fresh in GOV.UK Frontend but this needs to be planned and carried out responsibly. We'll do it eventually, just not right now. Working in this in-between space is unpleasant but we can't solve every problem all at once, even if being on the Design System team sometimes feels like we should.
The other work thing is that I had my first proper mentoring session with my mentee. I'd set half an hour to chat about how they were doing and it ran over by a good 20 mins from us discussing a few technical concepts that are common place in the dev experience world but out of context, for example if you're new to frontend development or programming in general, make no sense. Stuff like what the flipping heck a dockerfile is.
I think I'm getting a good idea of how best to run these sessions for the benefit of my mentee and myself. It's been a while since I did any consistent technical teaching outside of the odd talk to my team and I find it helps me get my thoughts together on stuff I don't know I know. There's also the angle of doing a good thing. I recall when I first started in web development. I could've really used someone giving me some guidance and explaining all the bizarre concepts that are second nature to everyone else. It definitely would've been a better experience than looking at /r/web_dev on my lunch break and feeling totally alone. It's nice to help out.
It's mostly boring health stuff this week. Sorry.
I only had one class last week so I was worried I'd be really rusty but I'm fine. It's been interesting this week in that a bunch of new people joined. This is always a neat measuring stick of how I've improved, compared to getting tapped out over and over by higher belts. I think I'm doing ok. These new people as well are a specific brand of students who aren't super confident or assertive initially and don't try to brute force their early sparing sessions. This is in contrast to more confident or athletic new folks who will try to 'win' spars from day one. I appreciate the challenge of the latter but the former is interesting to spar with as it gives me an opportunity to work on my offence, which I'm in dire need of.
I'm wondering about my schedule. I only did 2 classes this week which felt like plenty. I recently changed my plan to unlimited rather than 2 a week with the intention of doing 2 classes and an open mat (just sparing for an hour) but the few weeks I did that I was left exhausted. Maybe I need to step it back and work my way up.
The pub after Design System Day was nice but I forgot my limits. The train back to London the following day was the roughest I've felt in a little while and prompted some thoughts about my drinking. I don't consider myself a big drinker or dependant on alcohol but I do tend to not know when to stop when drinking socially. So this week I've started tracking my sobriety.
This isn't a commitment to be sober 100%, I had some wine on Tuesday and a beer on Wednesday at home with my wife for example, but tracking helps give me an idea of how much I'm drinking and makes me think about it before I start. An achievement here was that on Thursday I went to a birthday party and for the first time I think in my life I had a completely dry night at a pub with everyone around me drinking. I expected some sense of FOMO but I felt perfectly fine. It's nice to know I'm able to not drink if I want.
If I keep this up I might write more about this.
I've been getting into coffee as a hobby recently, specifically the act of preparing coffee from bean to cup. This is very common for me in my food hobbies. It's a big reason I enjoy cooking and baking.
This week though, I bought 2 absolutely bananas pieces of coffee kit:
Both of these set off an alarm in my head that maybe my interest in coffee could be a cash sink. Whilst making coffee doesn't exactly have a high barrier for entry, it's possible to get really, really geeky about it. The intersection of food science and engineering means that if you're not careful, you could end up spending thousands of pounds on very high quality machines and tools.
Both these new toys have been satisfying to use though so I'm feeling confident I won't financially cripple myself. Next week I'm going to start clearing out old bits of coffee kit like cheaper manual grinders and the dodgy automatic grinder I've been using to make sure I'm keeping the hobby lean.