Weeknote 28: Trying to make a Forza Horizon pun

Good day. I'm off work again, teehee. I've taken every Friday off in May thanks to some carried-over AL. It's kinda cheating on the comment I made last week that I need to start doing these on Friday again, but it does mean I get them done.

SO WHAT HAPPENED?

  • Had our usual reflection week things: show and tell, retro, planning etc
  • Helped scope and plan next cycle where we're gonna back-port the brand updates to v4 of GOV.UK Frontend, including a little investigation into what we can do to remove barriers for users on v4
  • Helped the content folks on the team with sanding off the edges of our release notes for 5.10.0
  • Provided technical support for the release of 5.10.0 itself

Penny v4 your thoughts?

I kept trying to make Forza Horizon jokes with this but v4-za looks a bit weird written out.

So this is what I'm doing next cycle. We'll be releasing 4.10.0 as a final v4 release to pleasantly mirror 5.10.0 with brand changes behind a feature flag. This is theoretically quite simple but there are layers of complexity. Firstly, how will our changes interact with a v4's browser support? The changes in architecture? This is the known possible road bump. The less known road bump is actually facilitating v4 users adopting the brand updates. Ollie pointed out that there's no way currently for v4 users to see the brand changes besides looking at the current website, which is geared to v5, and intuiting which bits are for v4 and which bits aren't. Something for us to look into.

Another thing that came up is what's next. We don't want to release any more v4 versions after this. Because of this project and a few other corporate-y things that happened, we missed the 1 year anniversary of v5 where we were gonna review support for v4. The need to support v4 was in the interest of supporting older browsers as we made the conscious choice to scrap older browsers like IE from our support model, but what does that look like now? Even if services have users on those old browsers, is that a reason to support an old version? Should we be telling those users to manage this themselves? If we have time, I think it's something else worth investigating or at least noting as we go.

I'm hoping this'll be nice, satisfying move-the-tickets-from-one-side-of-the-kanban-bored-to-the-other type work but lets see.

Five-point-ten-za Horizon

I'm so funny.

We released 5.10.0. This contains the brand updates behind a feature flag. As I typically say in these notes, if you are responsible for a uk gov service using GOV.UK Frontend, find time to read the release notes and update or I'll do ya one. Remember in this case that the new release itself is pretty innocuous to just get into production. Turning the brand updates on is a little more involved; all in the release notes. Don't turn that flag on until June 25th please.

Owen's boring life

Not very much happened this week. I've not done any exercise besides stretches and trying to get the steps in. My back is almost entirely recovered save for some light soreness in the mornings. Probably I should just try doing some strenuous movement to get the blood flowing and just see if that actually helps. This is also my written contract with myself to resume jiu-jitsu next week.

I failed to listen to either album I mentioned last week but I did listen to the new Beirut joint. I don't know Beirut super well but it's extremely easy to grok what they're about if you listen to like 2 of their songs. This feels like a light expansion on the traditional folky sound but retains the floaty, soft energy. Maybe soft isn't quite right here? I'm usually very bad at picking up stories or messages in music but I can sense something here. The album title might give it away. I'm seeing them next Friday as well so best to brush up.

Also only joking, I'm listening to Face Down in the Garden right now! It's really good. More Tennis, but it's good Tennis. Weight of Desire might be their best song. I'm also seeing them in October as of this morning.