Weeknotes 21:03

January 18, 2021

Week of January 10-16

• I started out the week by taking my oldest back to college. She took classes remotely for the Fall Semester. But we decided that it would be best for her to go back to campus for the Spring Semester. We had snow for about 2/3 of the trip up to Nashville but it was not sticking on the road. I am still not that comfortable driving in the snow after living in Florida for almost 13 years. I have only had to drive in the snow a handful of times since we moved to Chattanooga 8 years ago. I helped my daughter clean up the on-campus apartment that she is moving into. And then unpacked the van and said goodbye to her for the next four months.
• On the way home from Nashville, I listened to three episodes of the 99 Percent Invisible podcast. I will say more about those episodes later in the post. For our team Campfire, we were supposed to listen to one episode of the podcast and then share it with our teammates. Our focus was to think about how they crafted the stories they shared to help us become better storytellers. I ended up giving a bit of a history lesson during our discussion of an episode about the demise of GeoCities. The only time that I listen to podcasts is on road trips like this one.
• Back at work, I had a quick two-day project that I worked on and launched on Wednesday. The Greater Washington Partnership was publishing the second Capital COVID-19 Snapshot focused on reopening plans. LGND designed a new page template for their site and I built it over the two-day period. I was able to reuse some of the layouts from the first version of the snapshot along with building out new layouts for the second version of the report.
• I wrote a blog post, My Typical Day. I have seen several web developers post about their typical day so I decided to take advantage of this easy opportunity to create a post. I shared the link on our company Slack and it sparked some interesting discussion.
  • Jeremy Keith
  • Dave Rupert
  • Cassie Evans
• A project that I worked on in December launched on Tuesday. Our team designed and built a new case studies section for the Iridium site. I built out the template for the individual case studies and built the archive template for the case study listing. I was able to tap into some plugins that the Iridium team already had on their site (Facets and SearchWP) to build out the filtering for the case study archive page.
• A third project that I had worked on the week before launched on Friday. I built out a new page for Sharing Solutions 2021 National Tour along with a single event template to display information about each individual event. I had finished the first round of development last week and then we showed the client early this week. After making a couple of changes based on the client’s feedback, we launched the project on Friday.
• I helped out as we continue our search to add another developer to our team. I reviewed several resumes and portfolios and we had an interview at the end of the week.

Listened To

• Sign Stealing (99 Percent Invisible Podcast) – I enjoyed listening to this episode which centered around the 2017 Houston Astros sign-stealing controversy. The story centered around one of the opposing pitchers, Mike Bolsinger, who was adversely affected by the Astros scheme. The relief pitcher was hit around really hard and sent back to the minor leagues after the game and never made it back to the major league level. The episode also discussed some history of sign stealing.
• The Lost Cities of Geo (Geo Cities) (99 Percent Invisible Podcast) – Chalked full of a lot of the history of Geo Cities. I know a lot of web developers got their start by customizing their pages on Geo Cities. Much of the episode centers on the efforts to archive Geo Cities pages before Yahoo pulled the plug on the community. The episode also included a story about the end of life of Sims online. It was a very thought-provoking episode about the impermanence of the Internet.
• A Side of Franchise (99 Percent Invisible Podcast) – Marcia Chatelain talks about her book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, which offers a critique of racial capitalism and a long history of trying to address social problems with business-based solutions. This episode was more outside of my interest and comfort zone but I am really glad that I listened to it.

Watched

• WandaVision (Disney+) – Our family watched the first two episodes of this new series on Disney+. We are really interested to see where this story goes.
• Somebody Feed Phil (Netflix) – My wife and I have been rewatching episodes of this series. We enjoy the places and the interactions Phil has with the people he meets around food.
• The Repair Shop (Netflix) – I am bummed that we have watched through all of the episodes that they released in December. I really enjoy this show and it is a nice thing to watch with other members of the family.

Played

• I am continuing to play a season in MLB The Show 20 with the Tampa Bay Rays. Almost halfway through.
• FIFA20 – I started a new manager career with the Rangers of the Scottish Premier League. I decided not to the new FIFA21 title this year. This is the first time in about five years I have not bought it.