Weeknotes – series 07 episode 10

Space for new work and design debt

For what feels like the first time in about 6 months, we have a bit of breathing space. We've been in reactive mode for a long time, responding to questions and issues that have arisen as our design hits the constraints of the platform we are building on.

Finally, we are getting some space to work on some brand new requirements. I'm trying to force myself to not dive straight in. I think we still need to do some effort versus impact type workshops as a team to help us pull together all the constraints, dependencies and user needs. We desperately need a shared understanding of the scope of the work.

I’m also keen to make some progress with our design debt and accessibility statement work. This post about Design debt by Gavin Elliot arrived just in time.

Coming up to 1 year contracting

I’ve been on my current contract for almost a year. And it’s on track to be at least 18 months if things go to plan. I’ve not stayed in a role longer than 12 months since I was at Swirrl, so I’m enjoying the chance to really get my head down and make a decent impact (in this case, get a big chunky product out into private beta).

We’ve just started our 5th Planning Interval (PI) which is a 6 sprint phase of work. I’m yet to be convinced by PIs, but just like with sprints, having a set period of reflection time at the end of a period of hard work is very welcome. That short reset period makes it easier to maintain focus and effort for the rest of the time.

Mentoring

I started mentoring someone this week and found a couple of interesting resources off the back of my discussions with them…

RSS feeds, blogrolls and Feedbin

I updated my blogroll this week. And I’ve simplified the content a bit, to make it easier to maintain.

Plus, I’m really enjoying subscribing to blogs and reading them in Feedbin. It feels like RSS feeds have finally clicked for me. The experience is more relaxing than scrolling through social media to find things. I’m actually enjoying the reading experience. Tempted to move all my email newsletter subscriptions there too.

White default in autocorrect

A few articles about how autocorrect systems exclude people who don’t have white, English sounding names. Via Priyanca.

Frontend devaluation

These two posts about the devaluation of frontend web development really hit home for me.

I said on LinkedIn…

From my experience with quite a few different teams over the years. I’d say that convincing orgs that someone should be focusing on the front-end has become a bigger problem than convincing them that someone should be doing user research.

Links and anchors

I wrote about standards for links a few weeks ago. This blog post is great too: Links and Anchors by Michael Mathews and Ian Pouncey. Might move all of this link stuff into it’s own blog post.

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