Weeknote 10: Bass in a basement

We are in the double digit era. It's a reminder that actually I've been doing a decent job of keeping up with these. 10 isn't the biggest number but it can be a big number. I wonder how many more I'll do? Whatever. Let's get into it.

Something something link text

Still doing this link text thing. We're making really good progress. We've nearly finished drafting updated text for the ones we've identified as needing more work and have started making pull requests to update them on the website and get them out into the world. Cal's been doing a great job at managing this and pushing the work forward. He's described it as 'content management at scale' which he and the team often don't get to work on.

I've been enjoying drawing lines between where links live across our codebase to see if I can make shipping our changes more efficient. For example, I found out just today that roughly 63 links can be attributed to 1 line of code in our example partial, the code 'snippet' we use to render examples of components in our guidance which also include our nunjucks macro APIs for those same components. We add a line to the end of some of our API descriptions if that param has it's own sub-params which we could spell out a bit more. Big fan of sneaky easy wins like that.

Something something search results

We're still refining how our search results are displayed. We've got the thing itself built and it's likely that this'll be what goes out with some minor tweaks.

Something really neat we did was do some extremely light touch 'user research' with a few colleagues to verify some elements we weren't super confident about. I hasten to call this user research in the complete sense. More like a design crit where we were initially not super forthcoming with what our colleagues were critting. Big up Hazal for setting them up and running them. I really like the idea of hallway testing like that and being able to very quickly come up with the idea to verify something and then verify it. There is of course a distinction between this very fast style and a more considered, planned style. Probably most things should lean towards the latter. I'm hoping we can talk to Kat, our user researcher, about this a bit more and maybe establish some criteria for more light-touch speedy testing.

Realising our releases

The new thing I've been helping out with is reviewing our processes and policies for releasing versions of GOV.UK Frontend. It's very valuable to take a fresh look at our procedures in full every now and then and already some interesting stuff is starting to emerge where we can make adjustments. This also includes breaking releases aka: when the first number in the 3 numbers that make up our version changes which is very exciting.

The chats we've had so far have been really great. We've been working through tensions between the tech and content portion of the work and understanding where our context has changed and specific steps have quietly become antiquated. Everyone's being candid, thoughtful and kind. Solid stuff.

In my life

I had a surprisingly busy few days this week. BJJ Monday and Wednesday night as usual. A gig on Tuesday. The office on Thursday. I appreciate having today to keep things lazy.

So that gig, it were me' brother! I went to see him and his band play bass in a basement in Shoreditch. It was nice to see him and generally nice to go to a tiny gig. I never go to small gigs these days and they've got this community-ness to them.

I also started playing Arranger, which I've had sitting on my Switch for ages. Still very early but a very nice little puzzle game so far. Also a bit of a star indie game dev staff, including the writer for Celeste and the artist for Braid.

I also made this very nice vegetable soup that I wanted to advertise. It's what my mum in law used to make my wife when she was a child and it was 'cold' (cold in Brazil = a comfortable UK summer's day). Onion, spring onion, garlic, courgette, carrot, potato and broccoli for the veggies. Parsley, oregano, turmeric and a tiny bit of chilli powder for seasoning (obviously salt and pepper to taste, obviously). Fry the veg a little bit in a pot, seasoning, water, boil, optionally blend. Very very good for the season. Do yourself a favour and make yourself a soup.