Weeknote 16: Tiny Oprah
I'm a little sleepy this evening. I've had an uncharacteristically social week. A few friends came round mine for dinner and some drinkies on Tuesday, then me and the wife went round some other mates for more dinner and more drinkies yesterday. I'm nursing both a drink hangover AND a rich food hangover. However I'm determined to write this weeknote on the Friday like I always mean to.
Moving headings around
The work week was taken up almost entirely by continuing to try and automate the building of our release during our publishing process. We're very nearly there. Just yesterday I managed to get automatic pull request generation working. How posh! Most of the remaining work for this has been making the code clean. That's writing tests (I know I should do it ahead of writing the code I know I know) and appeasing our linting and types tests. Sometimes a little irritating compared to the meaty problem solving but ultimately satisfying.
Whilst I enjoy getting involved in heady design stuff, being left alone to just write code is a rare luxury that I've appreciated over the past few weeks.
'Water cooler moments'
I wanted to briefly shout out getting to properly meet Helen Nickols in the office yesterday. Helen is a content designer, former GDS colleague, current Ministry of Justice design system team member and Design System Day 2024 panelist. Her and Cal had been chatting for a while about doing co-working and it finally came to yesterday.
It was far from strict or official. Me and Cal did our work, Helen did hers, we chatted, we grabbed coffees, we lunched. All in all a normal office day with the sole difference of being able to talk to Helen about what the MOJ design system is getting up to at the moment and her getting to talk to us.
The MOJ design system is a lot closer to specific services within MOJ's purview so they've got more insights into how their design system is being and could be used. It's also great talking to her in the context of our team's future aims around how we position ourselves among the many design systems in government.
I look forward to seeing Helen in the office again some time. I enjoyed her stories about her son being a tiny Oprah and guiding her through getting frustrated after she dropped a plate.
Life strife
I don't have any strife in my life at the moment don't worry.
As mentioned I saw some pals which has left my social battery haggard but was still very nice. Tuesday was a picky bits night round mine with the prime picky being my homemade brigadeiros. Thursday was some absolutely cracking garlic prawns with a mediterranean/north African lamb main, which sounds like it wouldn't work but absolutely did.
I've started watching Twin Peaks over the weekend. I've wanted to see this for a while but it was admittedly jump started by the untimely death of David Lynch late last week. So far, exceeding expectations. The deeper into the series we go, the more dreamy it gets. Some of the most interesting, intense and actually quite funny telly I've seen for a long time.