Weeknote 11: Fish and chips

It's cold and I'm fading fast. My wife will be bringing fish and chips home from work tonight so we've got until then, when I will completely check out, to get this weeknote written.

Race to the finish

The theme this week has been finishing stuff. Makes sense since it's the last week of the cycle and the plan is to not do any more on the DAC audit of the website for a while. I'm very happy with the progress we've made.

To start with, we've done almost all of the link text updates. Cal, as usual, has been a champ about keeping the ball rolling with getting edits into pull requests or reviewing my pull requests. Collaborating with him has been easy, as it always is.

Next we've very nearly finished our redesign of our search results. We just need to get the code reviewed and merged. This stalled a little bit whilst Hazal was doing her due diligence with some final investigation into the GOV.UK website's search strategy but we have something that I'm hoping we can get merged and published early next week. There's one final little iteration around the width of the search bar, given that our new results add some verbosity which makes the whole thing feel a little more squeezed. We'll be looking at that, again, early next week.

Finally is Anika looking at updating our accessibility 'white papers'. That's our accessibility statement and accessibility strategy. This is the work I've been least involved in and it's made the most sense to just let Anika get on with it. Just before I logged off I saw she'd opened a pull request for the statement so, once again, early next week.

So we missed the exact deadline but only by a hair. It's still a win in my book.

How to blow up a GitHub action pipeline

The other interesting thing that happened was a little incident yesterday! We never get them by virtue of our extremely light infrastructure so it's scary but also kinda exciting.

We need to do some post-morteming next week but the broad strokes are that we think GitHub updated something which broke a 'good will' automated test we have to run our sass against very old versions of LibSass. For the uninitiated, LibSass is one of 3 sass processor implementations alongside NodeSass and DartSass. A key detail is that the first 2 are deprecated and projects should be using DartSass. This test is here because we've previously accidentally broken builds for users on old versions of LibSass, who can't upgrade because of numerous complex technical constraints, by including newer sass formatting that wasn't supported by these older implementations. This test is an attempt by us to stop us shipping code that those users can't use.

We managed to pop a plaster over the incident fairly quickly but it did prompt questions about these old tests. There's a balance to be struck between ensuring that all our users can use our package and being able to move forward and encourage others to do the same. We did this intentionally with 5.0. The rub is that in this case, the world might've caught up to us already. It's extremely unlikely that teams on these old sass runners are able to use GitHub pipelines effectively, so our code not working is the least of their problems. It reminds of some fun trivia: if you're a Windows user who's managed to install Internet Explorer on your PC, Windows will automatically open Edge and close IE whenever you try to open it.

All that's to say, it would be good for us to be intentional and thoughtful about dropping support for these things but the pace of technology makes managing this at a suitable pace tricky.

Cheeky Changelog

This website has a footer now! With it I've added a websites-of-mates page and, finally, the long demanded RSS feed. Follow me or summin.

In life

A classic Owen week all in all.

On Monday I returned to The Pemb for another shot at the quiz and we came... last place. I've started to accept that I'm not a trivia head, even if I find the quiz a lot of fun. I wonder if me and my wife, with the numerous friends and couples we bring along in rotation, are starting to get recognised by the host as the 'last place couple'. Still a jolly time. Still a great boozer.

Tomorrow I'll be going down to Horsham to see my mum and family for the weekend. I haven't been down for a while and it's really not that hard for me to get there, which might be a reason I don't go that much since 'I can go any time I like'. Either way, Big City Owen is looking forward to going back to the sticks to see his family.

Finally we've got another Final Food Paragraph. I've been doing more big batch cooking since my wife's started her 100% office job and I made the Chicken Ruby from Dishoom's cookbook. It's such a great recipe that I haven't made any other kind of curry for ages, plus it's the season for it. The smell got rave reviews from both our colleagues.