Weeknote 14: Paddington (the bear)

Twenty Twenty Four-get about it

It's been so long that the calendar is different! I hope everyone had a nice Christmas (if that's your thing), New Years and break. I had hoped to do a final weeknote of 2024 for w/c 16th December but I contracted some very fast acting flu that took me out for that entire week, so unless you want to hear about how much time I spent in bed with lime and honey teas then I'll skip that week.

I'm better now and I've completed a whole first work week so lets get into it.

Gathering data

Firstly I want to touch on the work that I was going to be doing the last work week of the year in the github stats work. I've got to give props to fellow frontender Brett who did an incredible job of taking the stats work forward in my absence. He's made the code feel a lot more grown up. We've been chatting to Trang this week about what a process might look like for the data being generated and her or another team member taking it away for analysis. I'm hoping we'll get more insights from Trang trying out that analysis this coming cycle. Watch this space for some fun statistics once we've polished this off a bit more.

Releasing at pace

Staying in the automation neighbourhood, something me and Brett are working on this cycle is automating the release process of GOV.UK Frontend. If you're not clued in, here's the procedure for releasing a new version of Frontend. The 'ritual' for a new release is that a handful of Design System devs get on a call, someone shares their screen and we manually walk through these steps. It's not the worst thing in the world but it's time-consuming, tedious and at risk of human error. Trying to move some of these steps into a handful of commands will streamline the whole process.

It's early days yet but so far we've been doing desk research on how other projects automate their processes and some desk interrogation of our current steps to see what could and couldn't be automated. There are obvious wins but also trickier wins. For example, how tricky is it to automate updating our changelog?

Another interesting angle that popped up is how we balance speed with security. Given we're an open source project, if we abstract the command to publish a new version to npm into a Github Action, could a malicious actor more easily try to trick us into publishing malicious code via social engineering? These are all things we're thinking about. I'm hoping we'll be able ot start getting code out there and testing it on future releases soon.

Five Point Great

Speaking of releases, new version of GOV.UK Frontend! If you're working on a UK government service, get 5.8.0 down ya.

What I did on my holly days

As mentioned it was the holidays and after recovering from my rubbish flu I did plenty of stuff so here is some of the stuff I did.

Spent Christmas and New Years in London again this year which honestly is great. I appreciate a quiet holiday. This is a culturally Catholic household by virtue of my lovely Brazilian wife so we had the big meal on Christmas Eve and loafed about on Christmas Day and beyond. I made the Dishoom Lamb Raan recipe which is very, very special. For New Years I cooked up a fat rib of beef with roasties. Sorry to the vegetarians and vegans in my life.

We watched a number of Christmas films but the traditional ones of note were The Muppet's Christmas Carol, the first Paddington film (we need to get to the other ones!) and all 3 Bridget Jones films. Not at all challenging or cinematically literate but that's not what the holiday period is for. Although Paddington One I'd argue is secretly a great my-first-anti-racist film.

I spotted that there's gonna be a new Okami game so I've been giving the original another go. I bounced off it when I tried the HD version a few years ago because theres a lot of talking and my patience for average-quality dialogue in an action game is very low. However after you push through an initial wall of irritating character banter, it's actually pretty excellent. There's a lot of juice. Running around the world with flowers blooming where you step feels great. The paintbrush stuff is a bit messy but feels fun once you get the hang of it.

Finally I've been doing a lot of music catchup. Firstly I finally gave Doechii a proper listen with her album Alligator Bites Never Heal. Man, what can I say about this record. If you like hip hop at all give it a listen. Her Tiny Desk Concert is a good place to start.

Secondly this week I've also started going back and giving R.E.M.'s early stuff a proper shot. R.E.M. are a band I hold very dear to my heart. I have an Automatic For The People tattoo for example. However the R.E.M. I know starts roughly from Document, their 5th album and approximately when Michael Stipe learnt to form sentences in his singing. I've listened through Murmur so far and it's different to what I know but it's also very very good. It feels more jangley and more folky, I think. I'll see how I get on with the others. I'm enjoying revisiting my favourite band with fresh eyes.