Weeknotes #5

It’s been a great week of ‘doing’ following last week’s theme of observation and generally getting bedded in.

There are quite a few meetings at Clearleft - it’s a change I’m going to have to get used to. They’re mostly at sociable times (early enough in the day to not cause major context switching). It’s currently compounded by two things though. I’m working on two projects, meaning two stand-ups! There’s also 1:1’s with every member of the team as part of my induction. That’s meant ~1:1/day for the first two weeks!

It’ll definitely ease off as I finish induction, and focus on one project, but for the time, Monday’s are especially busy.

I was able to properly get started on a project on Tuesday morning. It’s in Vue.js, which is a real treat to work with again. I was tasked with building a generic modal component, and it went very well indeed! I was able to get my first PR approved and merged that afternoon, and took a crack at refactoring the input compontents a little.

That evening, Liam (from my Tomango days) contact me out of the blue and we went to pub. It was lovely to catch up with his news, and share a bit more about my Clearleft beginnings!

My other evenings have been spent editing photos from Goodwood #77mm. I suppose I could talk about that too, as it was during this weeknotes sprint! It was a brilliant, and tiring day! I haven’t been to the circuit in quite a while, but it was great to be back. I took 4,732 photos 😬 which took more than a little while to sift through. Some of the photos will be below, but a more complete album is available here.

Wednesday at work was spent building a tricky component for a multi-step form within a modal. There were a lot of moving parts to it (literally, it was animation-heavy), so I spent an hour or so wrapping my head around the permutations of it. After a solid morning of focus, and a head-clearing lunchtime walk, I was able to wrap it up that afternoon. It was so good to get my teeth stuck into a complex problem and quell the imposter syndrome.

Much of that component was solved with dynamic scoped slots, not something I’ve seen much written about. So I spent Thursday’s train journey, and some of Homebrew website club writing up my findings. The rest of Homebrew was used to write documentation for Sergey (more on that later).

Jon, Danielle and I went to visit a potential client on Thursday morning. It was my first out-of-office meeting and truth be told, I was pretty nervous. Fortunately it went really well, and we had great chats on the train to and from. Two weeks in, and I’m generally feeling on top of things, which is rather nice!

That afternoon, I started on another project: a round of updates to a charity website. It’s in Craft, which I’ve only touched once or twice, but I’m feeling very confident about it - in fact, it feels very much like the bread and butter work I did at Tomango. PHP FTW.

Friday included more work on the charity site, a sprint retrospective, a fascinating brown bag lunch about how we plan and deliver research, all rounded out with a lovely spot of cheese and wine!

I also launched Sergey! It’s a tiny little static site generator designed for those who don’t want to spent ages configuring a full-blown SSG. It works well as a prototyping tool, a springboard to a different SSG, or an opportunity to take your first steps into the world of static site generation.

There’s still plenty to do with it, and I’ll no-doubt write a full blog post about it next week, but initial reception seems to have been positive!

Songs from the week

• Dancing in the dark - Gabrielle Aplin
• Wrong side - Noah Gunderson
• Things are gonna get easier - Low motion disco
• Music is the answer - Joe Goddard, SLO

Photos from the week