Weeknote 21: Clear blue sky

I'm a bit late with these this week. The weekend isn't finished yet but compared to last weekend, it feels like it's been long enough, for a change. The lovely clear blue sky today doesn't hurt either. I'm gonna start writing these now before I lose the minerals and skip this week altogether.

Still (feature) flagging

I've still been mucking around with feature flag testing. I managed to squirrel away on some improvements this week that I'm pretty happy with. I've experimented with a pretty basic config that can be used to articulate what component or components are impacted by a given flag which means we can also potentially do neat stuff like establish a consistent way to turn flags on and off or only show a UI for specific component landing pages based on if one or more flags impact it. It also makes it easier to do visual regression testing via percy.

It's still just conceptual but I'm hoping I can get the other devs across it next week. I'm trying to stay iterative and not imagine a future that might not be necessary, but it's also quite fun to imagine and plan for that future!

Lines on lines on lines

As we've been exploring header links, we've started veering into the service navigation component and its link states. Service nav uses standard link states but also a bottom border to denote when a link is 'active' aka a user is on that page or in that section of a given service, meaning you get this double underline thing going on when you hover over an active item. Hazal and Mia have been playing around with an alternative state set for service nav whilst I've been mostly yelling about what is and isn't technically feasible and more recently, implementing a prototype.

There are a few other little style changes coming down the pipe for service nav and this will be a nice thing to get in with the other changes whilst we're in the neighbourhood.

A tangent on extra curricular stuff

It's occurring to me that with this links thing and a few other code things I've been meaning to get back to that I'm starting to build up a backlog of unfinished projects which isn't too great. I go through waves like this where I feel motivated to start up/continue lots of stuff and then feel overwhelmed and have to drop it all. The pattern is there but I'm not addressing it.

I was complaining a few weeks ago to my team leads that we still haven't cracked sunk cost on work. We don't want to put stuff down because we're afraid we'll never pick it up again. However we've got a trelloified version of our roadmap which we use to work off of so what's stopping us being grown ups, putting the card into the next quarter column and revisiting it then? I'm wondering if I need a system like that for myself, plus a similar level of personal discipline.

Life guff

It was my wife's birthday last Thursday so on the day itself we went to Jolene for dinner. Gotta be real, for that price I've had better posh dinners and my wife agreed. Still far from bad. Then yesterday as an extra birthday weekend outing we went to the Brasilian modernism exhibit at the Royal Academy which was very plainly excellent. We also had a cheeky third outing today to go get gelato from local heroes Romeo and Giulietta what with the nice weather.

Last week I mentioned my diet which I've not cracked completely but I have been thinking about exercise. I've been experimenting with doing weights in the morning before work on the days that I try to build up the motivation to do them (and have often failed recently). So far, reasonably successful.

I had a realisation that lunchtime exercise often doesn't work for me because, in the calendar economy that I work in, people often like to jam meetings in the 1:30 to 2pm slot, right when the lunchtime period usually ends and the prospect of a meeting, even as far as an hour away when I'm trying to do something that might itself take an hour, stresses me out. I've tried over and over to fit exercise into lunch times and simply failed because the anticipation and lack of time to just chill doesn't work for me. Something to consider when articulating preferences.

I also had a really interesting conversation with my Wednesday Jiu Jitsu coach. I asked him what he thought I needed to improve on to get to the next belt stripe and he told me that that's not the right question to ask. Firstly, if he did tell me what I'm lacking in, I'd focus on those things and neglect other fundamentals. Secondly, only doing Jiu Jitsu with the promise of a progression marker is a recipe for disaster because if my progress ever drags, my motivation will drop which will halt my progress even further. Vicious cycle etc. It's not what I asked for but it's what I needed to hear.