Weeknote 5: Hot pot

This week has been a challenge. I've been feeling off since the weekend. Not enough to not work, I'd say to myself, but enough that I'm not firing on all cylinders. Following a chat with colleagues today I decided to take a half day. I'm talking to you now after an afternoon in bed and a takeaway, feeling more together. Thanks to anyone on my team reading this for reminding me to follow my own advice and prioritise health over the job.

DAC audit part 3

We're into a new cycle of the DAC audit work. The kick off for this third cycle has been kind of a come to jesus moment for the squad. We've gone over all the remaining DAC audit issues, looked ourselves in the eye and asked if there were any we don't want to fix. All the issues bar one are either WCAG triple A or usability issues meaning under public website accessibility legislation means we don't have an obligation to fix them. That's not a reason to not fix them but if they're too tricky to fix right now or we're not fully convinced it's an issue, we should feel empowered to fob them off.

For the most part, we're going to try to tackle most of the remaining issues this cycle and the rest we've kept around as small stories aka: things we'll do if we have time down the line. I'm feeling good about getting the last few done.

Bottomless inputs

What I've been mainly focusing on this week has been restyling the Accessible Autocomplete so that users who are zoomed right into the input know when the dropdown is displayed. Our designers worked on this a few cycles ago and the design is really neat. it copies what Google does for its suggestions: the bottom border of the input opens up so that the input 'flows' into the dropdown. The hypothesis is that the change of visual context draws the eye down.

Originally we also supplemented this with an arrow that would show up on the right inside the input to point the user down when results are available. However Ed gave some really interesting insights from previous research about why an arrow might be problematic for user interaction. So for now, in the interest of doing the thing, the arrow is in the bin.

One other spanner I found out about just this morning is the way we handle styling for the Accessible Autocomplete. The repo itself includes a stylesheet but we actually don't want to include that much in the shipped stylesheet because we expect users to style their own autocompletes. I don't completely understand it if I'm honest. It's a weird quirk from the way in which the component has bloated over time. Either way, next week I'll be making a new PR to do it directly on the design system website, saving us a release of the autocomplete.

It's been fun working on an interesting styling challenge. It feels like it's been a while.

Signed, sealed, delivered

We also did 3 releases of GOV.UK Frontend in 1 week! All of these are explicit asks from the crown. Super rare for our team which I'm very grateful for. There's no such thing as been completely left alone to get with what you want in tech, especially government, so I can stomach it.

1. 5.7.0 and 4.9.0 contain the new royal crest. The one you see in the footer of gov.uk pages. There are other really cool things in 5.7.0 to do with work the team have been doing on our javascript API but the new crest is the headline. If you want those API things, you gotta upgrade through 5.0 buddy.
2. 5.7.1 contains new department brand colours that have been reviewed as all the departments update their individual crests to match the new one.

If you're reading this and you run a UK gov digital service, you better get upgraded, like yesterday. OR ELSE.

I can't quit Exit this Page

Final work thing, fellow frontender beeps did an excellent write up on why we use the shift key to activate the exit this page component and not escape like everyone and their gran. It encapsulates the growing complexity of the problem and the depths we plumbed to figure out why it wasn't flipping working.

If you don't wanna take my word for it, it made it to the front page of Hacker News! The comments on it bummed me out because I ended up hyper fixating on a few that ignored (willfully?) the context it was built in aka: keyboard only users, having to take every conceivable scenario into account etc. However if I take a breath, most were in fact positive.

Go read beeps' stuff. This is another reminder that I need to put a blogroll on this website.

Not work

So yeah I've not been that well. I did try working through it both in work and in not-work and I think I'm paying for it today. All the same the week hasn't been so bad.

My sister in law is visiting at the moment from Brazil (where she and my wife are from!) and came round on Monday. I dug into my Bri'ish roots and made beef hotpot to try and get her into the UK spirit. Both Brazilians commented that served with some white rice, this is basically a staple Brazilian meal. Nice! I also balanced it by making Brazilian carrot cake which my wife would describe as carrot cake with no nuts and more sugar. Came out a neon orange on the inside. Delicious.

I only had 1 Jiu Jitsu class this week which I'm a bit ashamed about but I think it was the right call. Rolling when injured or ill is good for the brain chemicals, bad for the body, which is bad for the brain chemicals. I'll make it up another time.

Cosy media news

The therapeutic thing to do when you're ill is to consume some media. So, I started playing 1000xRESIST and reading Dandadan. I'm really interested in the background of both of these.

100xRESIST is made by Sunset Visitor, a sort of art collective based in Canada. This game is allegedly inspired by the rocky history between Hong Kong and mainland China. I've only played 1 chapter so far but I'm slowly starting to get why so many people have been recommending it.

Dandadan is a manga with a very recent anime adaptation made by Yukinobu Tatsu, a former assistant to Tatsuki Fujimoto, creator of the phenomenal Chainsaw Man. You can really feel the DNA of Chainsaw Man in Dandadan. It's got the same juvenile surface premise with a compelling story about the beauty and pain and chaos of human relationships. And a lot of occasionally great horror imagery. Really very good.

Owen the coffee scholar

Last week I spoke about getting some very dark coffee beans and I glossed over that the first cup I made wasn't very good. I have been pulling my hair out this week trying to dial it in and get something worthwhile out of these beans. Really dark beans like these are a challenge. I have learnt quite a lot about coffee chemistry and how to dial in a moka pot brew. It's led to some interesting vectors for experimentation. Starting water temperature, amount of water in the base, grid size etc.

However I think I've now reached a point where I can't get a good cup out of these beans. I don't know if they're bad. I think that I can only really get a very short cup of ok coffee out. It's time to throw in the towel and try something else.

A secret personal message for Steve

I haven't forgotten your ask. I'm looking into it.