Weeknote 4: Getting rid of my coffee grinders

Welcome to the spooky month. This and future October editions won't be themed. Let's see what I've been up to then.

The devil's in the details (and file inputs)

It's reflection week for the Design System team which is supposed to mean we down tools to focus on analysis and planning for the coming cycle, however we broke the rules and continued looking into vendor accessibility issues. What I was focused on for most of this week was continuing to drill down on making the details component work with Dragon with a lot of help from Anika.

The findings are that adding role="button" to the summary element does work, however this means that for users VoiceOver on macOS in Safari, the expanded state of the component is no longer announced. This however is remedied by using javascript to add aria-expanded to the same element and toggle it on click.

We also today had a bit of time to pair on the last issue: dragon and file upload (with a lot of help from beeps). The solution we have has been working inconsistently when tested. The findings here were frustrating but even more interesting. Our informed hypothesis is that interacting with something using Dragon doesn't count to browsers as transient activation. Basically browsers think we're trying to write malicious javascript to scam users. This isn't the end of the world is very likely impossible for us to fix on our own.

We'll be taking both these to DAC to get their opinion. This week has been super interesting and rewarding. Working with browsers and assistive tech is a wild ride.

Days away

The other big thing that happened was a GDS-wide away day in London. I'm not gonna talk about this very much because I often struggle to digest the sort of language and topics discussed at staff wide away days just like this one. I don't have any reflections because no light is hitting my iris.

Having said that it was nice to see teammates from other parts of the UK who I don't get to spend time with in person very much. Thanks Kat, Hazal and Romaric for taking my old coffee grinders off my hands.

What I do want to talk about more is something I shamefully forgot to mention last week: the GDS Frontend Community away day. This was in Manchester and I dialed in remotely so I didn't see anything, but what I did show up for was cool. I feel a bit guilty about how disconnected I've been from the frontend community in the past year so it's nice to feel at least a little bit like I'm still involved. Communities are a real use it or lose it concept as well. Participation is support.

I really enjoyed Ash talking about his failed mobile game empire.

No matter what we discover...

As a final extra, because it's reflection week that means we had retro for the squad. The main theme from the retro was maybe being too async when we could've done with getting on a call and hashing out the complex problems we were trying to solve. A less kind read of that is laziness about being in meetings. I'm very prone to meeting fatigue and have really appreciated a lighter calendar over the past few months. However for the stuff we're doing it could use just a bit of face to face chatting. We're gonna try to be more willing to get on calls in the coming cycle and see how we get on.

Stuff that isn't the job

We've got the jiu jitsu update, the coffee update and the cooking update.

In Jiu Jitsu I'm trying to think a bit more about my plan when sparring. In the Monday class I learnt a sweep from half guard that I reckon is going to help me out a lot. I find I can often get to half guard or even closed guard but get passed before I can remember and execute a sweep. This one is simple enough that I can remember it and do it suddenly to catch people out.

I got a bit excited and ordered this beautiful 6 cup orange pot from My Moka Home, a website that could be a big problem for my bank account in the future. Very excited for it to turn up.

I've also switched suppliers from Pact to Wonky Coffee. Both do the annoying subscription service thing which I'm not at all interested in but I'm attracted to Wonky's mission statement, it's a bit cheeper and I find I just don't enjoy the flavours in 'specialty coffee' that Pact is all about. I ordered the dark roast and it's proper dark. My wife says it makes her nostalgic for the coffee she'd have at her grandma's house in Brazil. Great stuff.

I'm in a baking mood at the moment. Specifically I've got an itch to make cookies but I need to find a decent recipe. If anyone has one they rate let me know.

FInally a cautionary tale. Content warning for a gnarly but non-critical injury. I was using a mandolin to slice carrots yesterday for lunch and my hand slipped and sliced off a sliver of my knuckle. I'm fine but it wasn't very nice. Work slowly and use the guard!