Weeknote 29: Animal kids

We're in early summer now which means it's my favorite time of year: animal kids season. There are now goslings in the park near my flat and I'm expecting more duckings and swanlings soon which I'm looking forward to. Last year we had a fox family in the downstairs flats' gardens who would sunbathe during the day which I'm hoping we'll see again.

All this is to say I'm feeling pretty good relative to the last month or so. Short week this week with the bank holiday Monday and me taking Fridays off this month. That along with the halfway decent weather, good for the mental minerals.

Anyway, this short week I did some things:

  • Started working through the stuff we need to backport to our v4 support branch in order to ship a v4 release of the brand updates
  • Backported some internal features to help us more easily test the brand updates in v4 such as brand update-specific Percy VRT tests and the feature flag toggling system I setup ahead of 5.10.0
  • Fiddled with the logo setup for v4 in order to make sure the backport works properly since we handle the GOV.UK logo differently between v4 and v5 ie: the crown and the GOV.UK text is one SVG lockup in v5 whilst in v4 the GOV.UK is pure text
  • Chatted with the squad about who our v4 users are and what their needs are, and therefore what else we should be providing besides just a new version of v4
  • Did some light planning for 4.10.0, the v4 version which will contain the brand updates

What we can do v4 our users

Char has been reaching out to contractors and perm civil servants who we know maintain or have worked on services still using v4 to understand why they're still on v4 and, from there, build a picture on what their needs would be for a new v4 version. So far, the responses are mostly in line with our reckons:

  • They inherited these services from previous teams/owners and only run maintenance
  • A number of folks haven't ever had to interact with updating their GOV.UK Frontend versions or engage with dependency management at all
  • When folks have had to upgrade their version, such as when the crown logo changed, they did so by just using the current design system website (which is currently using latest v5) and version release notes

That potentially makes things easy in this case. We could just host some code examples, as one possible simple solution. It does speak again to us thinking about our version support model between v4 and v5 and if we can help users stay as up to date as possible.

A little grumble about dependency management

It makes me kinda sad that whenever we do any investigation into services, a lot of them don't appear to have any kind of dependency strategy. Some of this isn't the fault of the maintainers but of the department not giving the service enough cash. However I am forming a hypothesis that having some sort of education on this would improve things for us.

2 ideas come to mind:

Owen's BJJ and music column

Yesterday I went to the first jiu-jitsu class in roughly 2 weeks. I'm still trying to figure out my schedule after moving to the new club but taking Fridays off means I can use my day off to go over lunch time. A really really great class, and I felt so serene afterwards. It's a reminder how much BJJ defrags my brain. It might say something about how I've been feeling the past 2 weeks of not doing any BJJ and how I'm feeling after just one class.

Also yesterday I went to see Beirut who were stunning, in spite of some initial issues with their speakers. A really big feeling concert, hopping between shoegaze but with brass instruments and bracing baltic jigs. Seeing them playing Postcards From Italy live has been a highlight of the year so far.