Weeknotes 20:05

April 19, 2020

Week of April 12 - 18

I moved my desk down to our first floor so my oldest (sophomore in college) could stay in my office while she finishes school and finals. I enjoyed the views out of my window this week as we had a week full of sunny days.

This week I finished initial development for Capitol’s CoLAB’s Employer Signaling System (referred to as Project A in last week’s post).

The Capital CoLAB’s Employer Signaling System (ESS) is designed to provide educators with a snapshot of the KSACs (Knowledge, Skills, Ability and Credentials) and professional development opportunities that will prime students—starting in high school and continuing through post-secondary education—for some of the most in-demand jobs in our region.

I am happy with how it has all come together. I love using CSS Grid Layout. The layouts came together really quickly. One use case that Grid Layout has helped with is tabbed content that fades in and out when choosing a different tab. Using the Grid layout, the tabbed content can all be set in the same column with z-indexing and opacity changes. It is a much nicer solution than ones I have had to use in the past including absolute positioning.

As I mentioned last week, I have spent a lot of time during this project determining how to best structure content. I also have given a lot of attention to crafting the back-end experience for the client to add/edit content in the future. I got some more encouragement from our account director on Friday.

The client team was really pleased with everything on the site today! (The account director gave them a preview of the site through Zoom. We will give them access to the staging site this week to begin the QA process.)

Things were looking and functioning as they expected and they didn’t see any flags as we worked through every page. Obviously, they’ll give it a closer look next week when they give it a full QA review, but seriously great (and fast) work!

Even as we walked in through the entire back-end, they commented that it looks very straightforward and they said they felt already felt good about making content updates in the future (and that is without even getting formal back-end tutorial yet!)

It is always great to get positive feedback on something that I have put a lot of thought into.

Other Thoughts from the Week

  • I felt very listless this past week. Judging from all of the yellow dust on my vehicles, allergies played a role. But I think it was mostly due to the current circumstances with COVID-19. It really wore on me this week. And still, there is not a clear end in sight. I was able to push through the listless feelings and was able to have a pretty productive week, both in work and in my reading (finished 4 different books this week).
  • My team at LGND met over Zoom on Friday to discuss the book, Range. I was really excited about reading this book a second time. I had requested it from our local library several times last year and they finally purchased it at the end of the year. I enjoyed reading it then and decided to buy my own copy to reread and mark up. We had a really good discussion about the book and it was a lot of fun to connect with teammates on a more personal level. I would like to put together a post about it soon so I can share what I got out of the book.

Accessibility

https://twitter.com/vavroom/status/1250135412825194496

I came across this on Twitter last week. I became familiar with Nicolas by listening to him and Christopher Schmitt (who I mentioned in my post last week) on Shop Talk Show last fall. It is interesting to me because I think a lot of issues in coding come back to bad markup or not understanding how a language is supposed to work (I am thinking of CSS). One of the low hanging fruits of accessibility is good semantic markup.

S-C-H-M-I-TWO-Ts

Speaking of Christopher Schmitt, I heard back from his wife Ari after I posted on Twitter about my weeknotes post.

https://twitter.com/ari4nne/status/1249913511112839168

I found it humorous because I had said that I knew more of Christopher than about him. Misspelling his last name proves my point. I was honored that Ari took the time to share some kind words with me in the midst of her grief. I replied:

The funny thing is that later that day, I had my last name is misspelled with an “E.” The local minor league team was doing personalized mobile wallpapers of the team jersey. I was able to get it corrected and now it is the lock screen on my phone.

Reading

I finished four different books this past week. One of them I started back in January and the rest of them I had been reading over the past three weeks.

Watching

  • Last Man Standing – My wife and I have been watching this recently before we go to bed. Not sure why I had not gotten into this show before.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation – watched a couple more episodes in season 6 this past week.
  • The Pilgrim’s Progress – This movie is free to view online through the end of the month.

Leisure

  • FIFA20 – I am continuing to play with Tottenham Hotspur. I have not been happy with my results and I have been allowing too many late goals that have led to draws or losses. I debated about continuing with Hotspur for a third season after I finish the current season or start a new season with a German team (have not played in that league for quite a while).
  • Madden20 – This game went on sale this week and I decided to buy it so I could play with Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs.
  • Soccer with my kids – I enjoyed getting out in our backyard with my kids and kicking around the soccer ball on Friday night. And my son and I got out and kicked it around last night before dinner.
  • Nidhogg 2 and Marvel Super Heroes – my youngest daughter wanted to play some games with me on Saturday.

 

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