Weeknotes 23:01
January 7, 2023
Week of January 1–7
Back to work
On Tuesday, I went back to work after taking time off for the last two weeks of the year. I was grateful that I had put together a PTO document for my team giving a status of the projects I was involved in along with some next steps. I am not sure it was helpful to anyone else, but it was really helpful for me to be able to reorient myself back into the project work on Tuesday.
I spent my time focused on the Toyota Policy Driver’s project that I started in December. I built out the remaining pages for the site and updated some pages the content has changed on. Later in the week, I refactored my layouts for smaller screens. I had mentioned before that I build my stylesheets mobile-first but that I build the site desktop-first and then refactor my CSS for those changes. I was very happy with how the smaller screen layouts came together because there were some layouts I had been unsure how to translate down.
I will finish up development next week and the project will move into internal QA (quality assurance) before we hand it over to the client for their QA the following week. The project is set to soft-launch on February 1.
New Teammates
I was really excited that we welcomed two new teammates to the LGND development team this week. Ross started with us in October as a contractor while he finished up some freelance commitments. He is going to be helping us with WordPress builds and other marketing-focused sites.
Brandon worked with one of our teammates, Josh, at another agency in the past. Brandon is joining us as a full-stack developer and will mainly focus on our growing application work.
We will be welcoming two new designer teammates next week.
Site Refresh
I spent some time earlier in the week adding new functionality to this site, moved the site editor to Gutenberg, and I added “notes” which serve as my own personal social feed. I will be posting notes in instances where I would have written a tweet in the past. I even wrote a short post about what I did and the why behind it.
Gartic Phone
We played Gartic Phone again at our LGND Campfire on Friday. Much like the first time we played, it was so much fun and I laughed so hard that I cried. It was a great way to connect with teammates at the end of the week.
Gartic Phone is like the game, telephone. It goes back and forth between word prompts and drawing pictures. Most of them get derailed at some point in the process and it is so funny.
Articles I read
My online reading this week was a mixture of year-end reflections, start-of-the-year motivations and challenges, some articles about the death of Pope Benedict, and several articles encouraging taking ownership of your content.
- Twenty Twenty-Two (Dave Rupert)
- You’ve Completely Caught Up For Now
- All Is Shadow Here Below!
- In 2023, Resolve to Revolve Your Life Around God
- Start the Year Small
- Annual Planning with the Ten Commandments
- Farewell, An Event Apart
- 2022 in review (Rachel Andrew)
- CSS Subgrid – I have to admit I am less excited about subgrid than I was when Firefox first implemented it. We have had to wait too long for broad support.
- Signs of Life – I found myself coming back to the main points of this article throughout the week. I am going to continue to ponder this perspective.
- 2022 (Jeremy Keith)
- Pope Benedict XVI (1927–2022): His Life and Legacy
- Was The Pope a Catholic?
- No Mercy Without Rules – An interesting contrast between the last two popes.
- The Same Old Faces – Very thought-provoking article about the value of longer-term relationships. The author talks about how exciting new relationships can be but points out depth comes from those relationships that have stood over time.
- Feeds Can Be Whatever (Chris Coyier)
- A Big Pile of Personal Developer & Designer Blogs in an OPML File (Chris Coyier)
- I feel contractually obliged to link to a post like “Bring back personal blogging” (Chris Coyier)
- C. S. Lewis and Mrs. Moore: Relationship of Sin or Sanctification?
- Four Words of Counsel for 2023
- I have a thing about Blackbirds
- Don’t Let the Culture War Steal Your Joy
- Good News for 2023: It’s Not About You – This is a great perspective to start the year considering.
Books I read
- Basic Christianity (John Stott) – The preface to this book was helpful to me 35 years ago when I decided to follow Christ. But I had never read the book. I was able to get it on sale for Kindle and have enjoyed reading it.
- We Need to Talk – I just got this book from the library and read the introduction last night. Dave Rupert had mentioned that he read it a couple of times this past year so I decided to give it a try.
What I watched
- MegaMind (Netflix) – The kids wanted to watch this to ring in the new year.
- Tales of the Jedi (Disney+)
- Knight and Day (Prime)
- The Swimmers (Netflix) – I mentioned this one in a note I wrote this week.
- Kim’s Convenience (Netflix)
- Bad Batch Season 2 (Disney+)
What I played
FIFA23 (Manchester City) – I started a new season and upped the level of difficulty. I just played 2 exhibition games on Sunday and did not play the rest of the week.