Weeknotes 19:06

May 18, 2019

Week of May 12-18

This week was a mixture of project work. It was nice to have a bit of variety as I worked on two major projects and several smaller projects that only took up part of the day. I experienced a really weird caching bug where some new work I did on a WordPress site was showing up in some browsers and not others. We finally tracked it down to overly aggressive caching by the hosting service.

One thing I did this week that is a bit different than my usual work was a print stylesheet for the users to print an action plan. I worked with one of our designers to simplify the design from the screen. We also decided to grayscale it since we were not sure if it would be printed in color. I used Chrome’s print emulation that you access in the console to help me do that. I switched over to using Firefox as my browser about a year ago because I really like the dev tools for Grid and Flexbox. I believe I saw that Firefox will have a print emulation sometime in the near future. I remember it being able to see print styles in the past when I used Firefox before I switched to Chrome.

The part I enjoyed most about the week was interactions with team members. As I mentioned, I worked with one of our designers on the print stylesheet. We also had a team interaction on Slack as we played Two Truths and a Lie for our end of the day standup. And then on Friday, I had my one-on-one with my manager who is the only other member of the development team. We talked over OKR (goals) for this quarter and then just chatted about a variety of things going in different projects.

Watched

  • Enterprise – I am re-watching this Star Trek series this summer.
  • Marvel Movies – Just realized this morning that I watched 5 Marvel movies this week. We decided our youngest was old enough to watch some of the more violent ones so we started with Captain America: The First Avenger on Saturday. Then we watched Thor on Sunday. My son and I have been wanting to re-watch Guardians of the Galaxy so I watched that with him and my oldest (who had not seen it yet) on Wednesday. Our family watched Avengers on Thursday night. Then last night I rented Dr. Strange and watched it with my oldest who had not seen it as well. My son and my wife saw Endgame on Mother’s Day. She had not seen it yet.

Books

  • I was excited that Eric Gorges’ book, A Craftsman’s Legacy, was released last week. Just as I have enjoyed the television series, I have really enjoyed the book so far. It speaks to my spirit and it is such a joy to get lost in the pages of this one.
  • Art Direction for the Web – I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was really excited about reading this book after waiting about a year for it to be written and published. I spent some time reading it on Thursday night. IO read about compound grids and different ways to layout content using Grids. Very inspirational. I would like to take some time to try to code up some layouts like he had in the book. The craftsman in me wants to build and enjoy using the tools of my trade to bring some of these layouts to life.

Reading on the Web

  • What the Fr(action)? – The second article in a series from CSS {In Real Life}. Discusses one of the gotchas about using the Fr unit that I learned about later from Rachel Andrew and Jen Simmons.
  • A memo to product and website designers – Post by Andy Clarke that ties into Art Direction for the Web

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