Week Notes 004

The Week

I am writing this super tired, so probably a shorter article, overall. This week has had some wins but also dragged a whole bunch. We had a positive demo and really productive retro. Retros are probably my favorite cadence meeting because it gives the team a chance to reflect on itself and the process instead of just getting work done or worrying about what's going on with the client.

I've also been having a lot of conversations about team culture this week. I personally have been pushing the idea of a "No BS" culture. I've tried to put that idea out there in norming sessions in the past where it applied to me as an individual. But with my newfound position of responsibility, I'm trying to make it bigger to encompass at least a little of the mindset of the whole team. I very much appreciate direct feedback and want people to come to me any time they have feedback for me. And I also believe in airing things out and addressing potential problems as quickly as possible. I don't like letting things fester and become so big they can't really be solved between just the two individuals anymore.

A lot of my frustration this week has come from acceptance test setup for my new project and meetings. The acceptance tests finally got to a good spot today after most of a week of problems. We're running on selenium, which I'm not super happy about. I'd throw it away and start fresh if I could. I just never really have any luck with it; it's always a huge pain to get working in any reliable fashion. Playwright is the tool I've used the most, and I like it quite a bit, although I'm really interested in trying out Cypress.

For the meetings frustrations, it's mostly been down to just getting the value out of a meeting it's supposed to provide and getting out. I really don't like it when meetings get off topic, or we start to belabor a point. I generally try to step in and get things back on track, but it can be difficult. Hopefully, we'll get better at this as the project goes on.

The Links

• 15 Minute Fix vs 30 Day Fix

  Great article from Dave Rupert - of Paravel and Shoptalk Show fame - about the tension between creating what you need for today and building ahead for the future.

• Web Animation Perf Fundamentals

  Solid guide on perf for web animations.

• Are PRs are bad, actually?

  Caused quite the stir in the great community and a 50+ comment thread in the work Slack around the value and purpose of the PRs. I personally think they're pretty valuable, but some very smart colleagues brought up some great points around mechanical processes, keeping branches as close to main as possible to reduce merge conflicts, and the joys of continuous deployment. Nuanced issue, but a great conversation.

• Visualization of Cascade Layers

  Jen Simmons shared an image comparing the use of !important flags in CSS with and without the new cascade layers. Still wrapping my head around cascade layers, on the whole.

• 5 Quick Accessibility Wins

  I really liked this article because it was so practical. I'm going to try implementing these on my website soon. Not this weekend because we're traveling, but soon.

Send-off

And that's it, folks. Thanks for reading, and I'll be back next week. Have a great weekend!