Weeknote 19: Pub disco

Happy love day weekend, if that's your thing. I personally followed a brief given to me by my wife to make lasagne with mortadella instead of bolognese and pistachio pesto mixed in with the bechamel (don't get on my case, purists; just try it). The next time I make it I need to double the bechamel I reckon. It came out a little dry. Iteration, nothing is the last thing ever etc etc.

Head-aches with feature flags

This cycle I'm working on adjusting the colour of the header (don't ask me why just yet; If you know, you know) and as part of that I've been thinking about how we use feature flags. There's been this long-standing interest on the team in using feature flags more as a wider mechanism to release stuff earlier and test stuff but we've just not. I chalk this up to there not being the need, up until recently with a couple of things coming down the pipe soon.

A few technical challenges have popped up. Where does a default flag live in our codebase, depending on what it is? What's our testing strategy when one or more flag is in flight? How do we visualise differences between flags? How do we document them? All tricky questions but exciting problems to solve.

A while ago when I was working on updating the type scale, I wrote some guidance on using feature flags for the team. It didn't get a lot of attention at the time which is fine given that it wasn't as relevant then. I'm glad I did because we now have something to stress-test.

Trying to prototype

The header colour brief carries a design problem to solve around active link colours for our (soon to be deprecated) header navigation. The designers on the squad, Hazal and Mia, have been collaborating on this but running into problems sketching designs.

Firstly, they tried putting together a prototype via the prototype kit. This is in theory the best solution. The kit is an established, useful, prestige tool. However, we're not building a service that uses GOV.UK Frontend to test; we're making adjustments to GOV.UK Frontend itself which involves unpicking the header component's CSS in order to manipulate it. Is that too much to ask non-technical teammates?

In the end the designers dropped the prototype in favour of Figma, however that's got it's own problems. As Mia articulated, this is a design that involves a lot of different states ie: hover, active, focus, those same things for large and small screen views etc, and documenting them in a 'flat' system like figma makes it harder to keep track of compared to something interactive and accurate to how it will behave when built, like a prototype.

This week was quite a lot of jumping on calls to do dev/design pairing (which is fine and in fact very good) and we've now got a solution for me to implement. This has prompted some thoughts about how we do this sort of prototyping on the team Notably if for us, one layer behind the kit as a vendor, is the kit the appropriate tool for design sketching? I wonder if it is vs just working directly in GOV.UK Frontend.

There's a root thing here as well around non-tech colleagues being able to work directly with the tech more independently. I'm a big supporter of uplifting non-technical people so they can understand the computer stuff and experiment with it without assistance. In my opinion, the answer is a balance of designers using the tools and mechanisms that suit them and the techies finding ways to help train our design colleagues. A tangential thought this prompts is that making our tooling simpler would also help with this.

Life

What else then???

I had a pair of pretty intense jiu-jitsu classes last week after only doing one the week prior due to flooding at my gym. Also sparring with my black belt coach from Monday who is very, very, very agile is always a workout. I'm reaching a point where the incremental improvements are becoming noticeable which is nice. I'm trying to take on advice from both Monday and Wednesday coaches to not rely so much on aggressive movement, to be more technical, think more about foundation and fundamentals.

I finished my little dip into R.E.M's first 4 albums, finally. Surprise surprise: they were always very good. Life's Rich Pageant especially is an exceptional early R.E.M album.

Yesterday as a little love day treat, we went to a late night at the Tate Britain and caught the Photographing Britain exhibit which is excellent. If you're in or around London any time before it ends, it is actually a requirement for you to check it out. It's massive, which was a little tiring towards the end but there's so much excellent stuff there. I can't really make comments about the politically inclined projects so I'll say that my favourite part was a series of early colour photos from a pub disco in New Brighton.