Weeknote 15: Second breakfast
We're back in the rhythm, and it's finally not below freezing most days in London. It'll probably be a short one. Let's roll.
npm run just-do-it-all-for-us
Primary function this week was continuing automation of our release and publishing procedure with Brett. Where last week was research and some strategy, this week was a lot of strategy and a lot of coding. We spent a good deal of time mapping out what we wanted to automate and started to jot up some draft github workflows. Now that we've actually put skin to keys it's quite exciting seeing it come together so quickly.
Something specific I've been squirreling away at has been a script to automate the step where we update our changelog. This is in theory very simple: we replace the 'Unreleased' heading with a heading for the new version, add a new unreleased heading above that heading, copy the contents of the changelog for our new release, so the contents between the new version heading and the heading for the last/current version, and paste that in the pull request that builds the release and in the body of the Github release. In practice though this is surprisingly fiddly. There's a lot of regex.
Two medium sized challenges have been how to structure this code and checking the version that's parsed to the script. Firstly there are at least two places where we want to get those release notes, but we don't always want to update the changelog, even though both tasks share code. Secondly we're doing some fairly in depth semver comparison, not just that the parsed semver is valid but also that it's more than the previous version and it only increments the previous semver by one. It's been tricky but also rewarding. With any luck we'll be using it to fire off releases by next week.
The life of Owen
The start of this week felt like I was still getting back from the Chrimbo Limbo(trademark) but I think I'm more or less firing on all cylinders now.
I'm back on the horse with jiu-jitsu, although I'm feeling like my ability is plateauing a bit. Improvements come in tiny increments that you don't always notice until they build up so I'm trying not to get dejected. An aim I have this year is to go to at least one open mat every month. Open mats are an extra 'class' in a week where you just spar. They're very good but very tiring. I tried going from nothing to once a week last year and failed so a more gentle approach feels like the answer.
I ended up having a sort of busy second half of the week. Thursday I was out for joint leaving drinks for Daniel and Kara. Then yesterday was, uh, my birthday! I'm a respectable 33 years old, and I don't look a day over 34.
I treated myself to some goodies from the Dusty Knuckle milk float and then in the evening me and the missus went to Saltine. Exceptional posh food spot in Highbury. Certain people who follow the RSS feed for these weeknotes might be excited to hear about the really good veal liver I had for my main. Today we're going to the Electric Dreams exhibit which I'm excited about.
A note on Vicky Teinaki
Most folks reading this will have heard about the sudden passing of Vicky Teinaki, a well known designer in digital government. It's not my place to write a lengthy dedication; I didn't work with her closely and I simply didn't know her well enough on a personal level. I will however say that her death comes as a shock and that she was one of the pillars of the GOV.UK Design System community. Her absence will be deafening.
I think the number of tributes I'm seeing come out in response to her death says just how much of an impact she had to her work and the people she worked with. I want to in particular highlight Frankie's tributary weeknote from this week as especially heartfelt and well articulated. I'm feeling for her close friends and family at the moment.