Weeknote 30: Light roast beans

Hey look at that weeknote number! Now these notes are gonna start aching in the morning and get hangovers from one beer instead of like 4.

My daynote for today so far has been cleaning up my cat throwing up all over our bedroom (she's fine now), fixing one of the legs on our bed, which I broke trying to get under the bed to clean my cat's throwup, and going to a BJJ class which has left me feeling quite fragile. Having said all that, not working on Fridays has been really good for the mentals and makes me wonder again about the prospect of compressed hours.

That's one for me to think about another time though. What's the week been?

  • Continued backporting the GOV.UK brand updates to GOV.UK Frontend v4 and figuring out what those updates mean for v4's browser support. Some fun standouts include:
    • learning that with some finessing we can keep the markup for the v4 and v5 markup identical, which is great for release note and guidance recycling
    • bumbling together a compatibility setup so that we handle the non-rebranded v4 header which is the crown svg/png alongside 'GOV.UK' as raw text, and the rebranded v4 header which is one svg lockup
    • pairing with Brett and scratching our heads about what to do about the colour mask we applied to the crest in the footer as it looks a little bit weird in v4 (I've got ideas which I'll be bringing up on Monday when I'm back to work)
  • Helped Char analyse the results of her v4 user needs investigation and came up with a solution which Char's working on, possibly right now as I'm typing this
  • Paired with our tech writer on identifying which parts of the 5.10 release notes we need to amend for 4.10
  • Helped out with the release of v5.10.1 to fix a few snags for the brand work and had some discussions about our release process
  • Had the first chat with my mentee in a little while, which we're supposed to be doing fortnightly but calendars haven't been lining up. Hoping I can keep up the clip on these more consistently

My team doing things

We released some stuff this week, or the opposite in most cases actually.

Firstly, yesterday we released GOV.UK Frontend 5.10.1. Upgrade your service or I'm comin' for ya.

Also yesterday, moments after, we removed the WCAG 2.2 callouts from the website. These callouts were originally an experimental pattern for us, not a pattern for users of the design system, as a way to provide temporary content in our guidance. The period for when this content is useful ie: before the October 2024 deadline when you service should be compliant with WCAG 2.2, is now up, so it's gone. There's a lot we can take away from this work, which we're trying out again via callouts for the brand updates. Hopefully we can iterate these even further going forward.

Finally, we've removed the asking users for gender or sex pattern. Believe it or not, this has been on our roadmap for a while because a lot of this is covered in our equality information pattern, but capitol G Gender it's such a political football (sigh) that it's always been kicked down the road. The recent supreme court ruling has forced our hands though. I'm not gonna be a cretin and avoid saying what I'm feeling, that I'm unhappy that it got retired because of this ruling and about the ruling itself. That's not a topic for this weeknote though, deffo not one I would bring any nuance to that hasn't already been spoken about on the internet by people who are much better positioned to talk about it.

Anyway

So, not very much else happened in my life. I'm pottering on. Happy that the sun's out, as trite as that is to say.

On Sunday after a BJJ lesson followed by a couple of rounds at the open mat, I spent a good chunk of my day in the park outside, followed by some ice cream. Shout out local legends Romeo and Giulietta, whose website I won't link to because their SSL is busted.

I'm also back on my coffee shit. I ordered an Ethiopian bean a few weeks ago and it's been my drink of choice during the week. More fruity, more acidic, tasty. I worry about coming off as snobby but I do actually like those light roasts. They suit the warmer weather really well.