Weeknote Zero

Weeknotes are a concept I've been interested in for a while but never actually engaged in. I won't get into what they are or why folks do them because it's been written about at length but how I interpret them is that they're a kind of work diary for corporate dweebs. That's a bit of an abrasive take, but that's the world we're a part of in digital government.

I wonder if this is what's put me off trying it out in the past. I don't do a lot of reading or keeping up to date for work or industry stuff these days. Given that I don't pay attention to what a lot of my peers are saying, what can I add that's useful or interesting?

At the same time, maybe the value of weeknotes isn't for other people. Maybe it's for me. To arrange my thoughts over a week, to reflect, to share how I'm feeling. The quirk of sharing this publicly both acts to hold me to account and allow others to further digest what I'm putting into the world. I might share a useful thought or someone might be prompted to share something insightful with me. Maybe I just want attention.

I think about something my buddy Steve writes whenever he shares a weeknote on LinkedIn:

Writing weeknotes helps me reflect on the working week and improve my practice.

Makes sense to me.

So I'm gonna give weeknotes a try. I don't know how many I'll make. Maybe I won't make any. Let's just see how I get on. I'll do my week just gone, 2nd September 2024 to 8th September 2024, as practice.

The week just gone in work

It was another reflection week last week. The space built into the team's 3 week cycle system to decompress from the cycle just gone and figure out what's next, and we needed it this time for a couple of reasons.

Navigating the release process

We've finally released a first iteration of the Service Navigation component which the team have been working super hard on.

I never really touched this work so I'll keep my thoughts on this brief and free of judgement, but from a distance this was a super tricky balancing act between the often conflicting asks of individuals in our community, flexing our own decision making power as the design system for government and a long term plan that makes the most sense. The whole process of getting something out and maintaining it is continuously evolving and we're continuing to figure it out.

Design System Day 2024 Part 2: To Liverpool

The DS Day annual UK tour continues.

We went to Liverpool, ran another event and basked in the glory. I used to work in event management as an office body and I could see how stressful it was operating stuff on site from the comfort of my desk. Being there as a volunteer you feel the intensity first hand. It's very tiring but the comradery that emerges from it is pleasant.

I think we put on a good show, in particular I loved the powerful and challenging talk on sustainability in digital teams from the brilliant Ishmael Burdeau.

The social episodes during and after the event were very nice. It was great to catch up with my teammates from other parts of the UK who I don't get to see that often and to meet members of the community, notably the chronically cheerful Josh from the BBC. I think after a very relaxed Friday and a full weekend I'm just about ready for the week ahead.

A huge amount of credit goes to the organisers who put this together. Incredible work!

Explaining source control

As a bonus reflection, before traveling to Liverpool I ran an L&D session with some of the team on git commit history management. Git and github have been a source of contention on the team between those who have the tools and knowledge to operate source control and those who don't. Typically, the management of git and a codebase's commit history is handed over wholesale to the technical portion of a team and those not regularly interfacing with production code such as content/interaction/service designers, delivery or product people etc don't have to worry about that.

The nature of the design system as an open source project doesn't really afford us that luxury. Github is, currently, the primary way we interact with contributors and record what we're doing in order to work in the open, which is a good thing. As part of this, our content is markdown files in a github repo and a lot of work has been done to democratise the process of letting non-technical team members interact with content stored as code and ensure folks can do it without needing a developer over their shoulder. This democratisation process falls over presently at the commit history level because the way GDS do commit history (which is also a good thing!), rewriting history and forcing updates of records, is only really available to developers both in terms of knowledge and literal write access.

My session was an attempt to alleviate this by spreading awareness to the non-techies on the team. I think it went ok. My personal takeaway is that git and source control is a much bigger subject than I anticipated and my attempts to ring fence the topic didn't quite work. The team had a lot of reasonable questions that got into the broader concepts of source control which I tried to answer in brief, but probably deserve their own sessions. I'll keep checking in with the team and see what I can do to move the dial.

Outside of work

Design System Day and git training took up a lot of my week but my mind had standing room for a couple of other things.

JPEGMAFIA's latest album

Peggy released I lay down my life for you and it's really got it's hooks in. I fell off of Peggy's stuff after not being super into All My Heros but this record brought me right back in. I feel a bit conflicted about Peggy himself, especially after he decided to 180 on Kanye but I can't deny how excellent the music is. In particular, I've been listening to it's dark and hell is hot over and over and over again. Brazilian Funk getting more air time is a good thing for everyone.

Cheesy pasta

Youtube loves sending me down random cooking rabbit holes. Most recently it's moved from Japanese eggs to cacio e pepe. Cacio e pepe is deceptively easy to mess up if you want to keep it traditional and only use pasta, cheese and pepper (the cacio and the pepe). I made one yesterday that not only split but was way too salty and gave me a stomach ache. I think I've nearly got it. Then I can move on to the next obsession.

That was pretty good. Maybe I'll see you next week.