Weeknote 20: Flagging

The week is over and I'm sparked out. I feel like there was a lot to get on with this week both in and out of work so my work rate was up which has left me feeling spread a bit thin. I'll write this then tuck in for a quiet Saturday.

Link thinking

There are two main things I've been working on this week to do with header colour experimentation. The first was finishing off some style updates to our header navigation. This is some slightly awkward in-between work as it's a feature of our header that we're angling to retire in favour of service navigation but since it's still an in-flight feature, we do have to support it.

The main problem with it is that we have an 'active' (not active) link style to try to denote when a user might be on a specific page within a service's navigation and, frankly, it's rubbish. It just changes the link to blue. That wouldn't be a problem since we want to retire it but if someone changed the header colour to, say, blue, it'd be completely unworkable.

The solution? Just copy the styling from service navigation. A thick underline under the list item containing the link itself with no reliance on colour. Solved. Very traditional style-wrangling frontend work.

By the way if you're reading this and your service needs navigation but either doesn't have it yet or uses the header component's navigation, consider service navigation. My team worked well hard on it.

Feature flagging

The second more involved thing I've been working on this week has been a way to toggle a feature flag on and off in our review app, a fairly simple express app that we use to test govuk-frontend. This would be more in the software/infrastructure level of the web, as we sort of have to manage this by re-rendering the app on toggle.

It's been interesting to return to that part of my job. Given that I primarily work in either CSS/JS or the design system website, operated by a markdown-powered static site generator, I very rarely mess around with the M and C bits of MVC. This has mostly been playing around with express router middleware and cookie setting which is a bit intimidating but refreshing.

Some ideas I've toyed with:

• Setting a cookie upon hitting an endpoint
• Managing rendering based on if a query param is present in the URL
• Having 2 sass root files, the default and one which sets a flag to true and imports the default, with their compiled instances being loaded based on one of the above setups

Owen's food tour of London and other things that happened

This week I ate pretty well. Maybe a bit too well. I've ended this week with a bit of diet guilt which on one hand I'm trying to buy into less but on the other it's probably better for my own wellbeing to eat a vegetable now and then. I will still write about them in this blog which is supposed to mostly be for work.

On Tuesday I met some work pals for dinner at Tayyabs, somewhere I'm ashamed to say I've never been before despite living and working in the vicinity for ages. I'm glad I popped by now. Those lamb chops are no joke.

Thursday was my designated office day and I had lunch at 3 Mien. It's not new since I go there for lunch almost every week, but I've started trying their pho and meaty rice offerings over their absolutely excellent banh mi's for a change and it's going well. I'm very privileged to have such an excellent Vietnamese place round the corner from my place of work.

Finally yesterday night we went to have pizza at the Dusty Knuckle in Harringay. Not my fave pizza in London but they know what they're doing. I so rarely see my beloved gorgonzola and walnut on pizza menus so anyone offering it goes up in my estimations.

I did also do some exercise. I had two quite taxing jiu jitsu classes, again. I sparred with my obscenely agile Monday coach, again. It left me battered and bruised, again. I'm wondering if I'm not doing enough to stretch before or after, or maybe I need to think about how I'm sparring. I do feel like the pieces are falling into place in terms of my own movement and effort all the same. I remember when I first started I initially felt like I'd been hit by a truck every class, a pattern that repeated when I altered how I sparred to be less lazy, so maybe this is just part of the journey.

Other than that I've been put onto this newish Isle of Whight female post punk duo (not that one) called The Pill and they absolutely rock. I tend to prefer more angry guitar walls of sound so this is doing it for me. I strongly recommend Woman Driver. I've been walking round the flat shouting SORRY SIR I APPEAR TO HAVE HIT YOUR CAR all week.