Weeknote 27: Road sign wall

Greetings, Sunday fans. The time I write these has really drifted from the originally intended Friday. I'd like to try and pull it back to a Friday activity rather than trying to slot it into my weekends.

Well whatever. What happened this week?

  • Decided that we don't need to publish a new release of the prototype kit as part of the brand updates, so we won't. Sorry prototype kit fans
  • Started investigating which examples with the rebrand feature flag turned on we want snapshotted in Percy as part of our visual regression testing strategy
  • Gave a little intro to updating a repo using GOV.UK Frontend to newer versions at our experimental installathon community event (thanks Ollie for basically penning the whole thing)
  • Got back to a couple of contributors last week
  • Did bits of github admin in preparation for reflection week next week

Installing an installathon

This week we tried running our very first 'installathon'. Imran gets credit for the name, and the idea in this context. The concept is an event where some techies who know their way around GOV.UK Frontend explain to folks what they need to do to move up onto the new version and make themselves available to troubleshoot problems. Maybe 'updateathon' is a more apt name. This was an initial experiment in prep for a more 'official' one we're planning on doing for the brand updates.

I've got a few reflections from it I found interesting:

  • After a quick intro where I tried to explain the philosophy of updating a dependency, how to interpret release notes, why you should stay up to date, supplemented with documentation we've written to that effect, a lot of the rest of the session was people quietly going through the update instructions themselves. It makes me wonder how much we just need to boost and/or talk through our existing documentation to get more people staying up to date and how that could pair with a committed event.
  • The intended audience for this event were folks instrumental in maintaining a service, responsible for their services GOV.UK Frontend version in some way, technical or otherwise. However a large number of folks on the signup sheet don't even use GOV.UK Frontend. This has happened before where we try to communicate in our messaging what an event's intent is but folks that are unlikely to get very much out of the event turn up anyway. We do do a mix of 'for everyone' events with the occasional 'for a specific group' event so I can see how that might get lost and folks would sign up without interrogating if a given event is for them. Something to think about in terms of our messaging, maybe even in the event itself.

Wot else

This section will mostly be complaining that I've tweaked my back. No idea what I've done but it's been singing and dancing since Friday. It's not debilitating but it's giving me enough bother that I haven't done any sort of exercise this weekend. It's a shame because it's meant I haven't been to my new jiu-jitsu club since Monday where I went to an excellent open mat. Loads of really excellent folks, including some very capable white belts in competition training.

Yesterday we went to the Design Museum, mainly to see the Tim Burton exhibit. 'Burtonesque' feels like a bit of a trite, edgelord descriptor nowadays but you can't deny his influence, or the levels of imagination in his art. There was one really good set of drawings of number from 1 to 10 where initially the 1 is depicted as very lonely but finds a friend in a 0 in 10.

We also had a look around the permanent collection, by which I mean the usability design bit upstairs. It's illegal for digital government employees not to go see. I obviously went to the road sign wall where they explained how the transport font was developed, although honestly I prefer the displays on Braun and Sony.

There are a couple of albums I need to catch up on. Tennis released Face Down in the Garden the other day. From what I've heard of this record it's more Tennis, like the last albums, which is great! Also they're always a joy to see live so looking forward to them coming to London. Also the other day, Viagra Boys released Viagr Aboys. I've heard next to nothing from this album but people have been saying good things. Very different from Tennis. I'll see which one sticks to me.