Weeknote 25: Blueberry muffins

I hope everyone's having a fulfilling and/or healing Sunday. So far I've been out to buy stuff for a nice lunch, made a nice lunch and have been trying to fix my dishwasher after putting it off for a year plus. It finished an initial empty run whilst I was writing; fingers crossed it's operational again.

I really don't want to bang on for another week in the intro about how I've been feeling burnt out but it is still there. I find that burnout is 50/50 pressure put on you by your work and pressure you put on yourself. I'm hoping to finally take steps towards the latter after not really doing anything and hoping that something would improve with the former.

Anyway, what have I been up to?

  • Added a feature for the rebrand to give nunjucks users a shortcut to rebranding their services (if they're not doing anything with the header or footer blocks)
  • Investigated an extension of that first bullet point to give nunjucks users a way to switch on the rebrand regardless of how their code is formatted
  • Looked into how both these things interact with the prototype kit, including some guerrilla research with the community (thanks Joe for helping out with this)
  • Had a catch up with Ollie ahead of his return from parental leave next week
  • Did some thinking about the guidance and documentation needs for the my nunjucks gubbins
  • Other odd little bits and bobs like documenting the feature flag toggling UI from last cycle and merging improvements to the auto release process

Nunjucks shortcuts

This is what my bag is for this cycle. A way for our users using nunjucks and therefore we assume our nunjucks macros directly to more easily update their services with our brand changes. This is most beneficial for prototype kit users, where the kit is an express app using nunjucks, and us with our website which is a metalsmith static site using nunjucks for site generation.

The first bullet point is pretty simple. Add a variable to our nunjucks page template that sets the rebrand class and turns the rebrand param on for the header and footer. The second bullet point is a little more involved. We want to be able to set the rebrand param on the header and footer from inside the components so that they can be changed anywhere. Thankfully we have nunjucks globals at our disposal which means we can check for a global variable in the component macro and then ask nunjucks users to add a line to their app code.

The outcome for this feature and the prototype kit has been positive as well. Not only does the kit have an addFunction method in its API which prototypes can use to set globals, we can also manage this automatically from the GOV.UK Frontend prototype kit plugin. We add a function to update the global and ask prototype kit users just to add a line to their configs; something like rebrand: true. Easy.

Next week I'm hoping we can implement all this properly. It'll be really neat once it's done.

Some thoughts on prototype stuff

Me and the team haven't touched the prototype kit at all until recently and in fact I was a little nervous to dip into the cross-gov prototype kit channel as part of this. The kit is still heavily used which is good for asking about how folks are using it on the fly, but that's also a smell that something so heavily used has no support, something our team simply doesn't have the space to do. From asking about my shortcut stuff, it's obvious that there's a need for further feature development and even just feature completion. It's not dissimilar to something I wrote about in and early weeknote about the Accessible Autocomplete but at a much bigger scale.

I don't know if any GDS budget controllers read these but I'll note something I've discussed privately with other colleagues that we really need a prototyping in government team. Not prototype kit, prototyping. The kit is one solution to a wider problem of prototyping stuff and a team to own that problem and investigate and maintain solutions would be great for enabling teams to build and try stuff quickly. Our users for example ask about a supported figma library for the design system (which is distinct from a community operated one) all the time. Imagine if we, or a team, had the time to provide that?

Alternatively you could give our team more cash please thanks.

The life beyond nunjucks

It's not all been antiquated javascript templating libraries this week!

Me and the wife started paying for Mubi again as part of an audit of all our streaming services, and to get free film tickets. So far it's been pretty great! Firstly to note, Mubi have improved their TV app a million-fold. It was absolutely shocking before. Also those arty films are pretty good! Just after writing my weeknotes last week, we put on Smoking Causes Coughing which is a super funny, absurd flick from the French lad who made that film about the psychic tire. Then in the week we finally watched The Substance which you already know about. Woah. That film goes as off the rails as everyone said it did. Lots of squealing and looking away going 'no, oh no'. A wild, fun ride.

It has not been springtime for my jiu-jitsu habit recently. Only 1 class again after my Wednesday coach had a cold and I don't really feel like I gave it my all. Not all my fault necessarily but my love of the game is continuing to wane. It's unclear how much of this is work burnout or BJJ burnout. I think it might actually be this club burnout which I'm trying to alleviate with a trial class for a new club next week with a lot more flexibility. We'll see how we get on.

Finally I made some blueberry, white chocolate and oat muffins at my wife's request on Friday. I've not done any baking for an age and it's a centering experience to force myself to do it again. Little stuff like this that takes me out of the day is valuable in building my minerals back up.