Weeknotes 23:03

February 5, 2023

Week of January 29–February 4

Back to work

After having my life interrupted by my mom’s death and getting sick with COVID-19, I finally returned to work this week. I had tried to return a week earlier but was experiencing too much brain fog and fatigue to get anything done. I think I lasted a couple of hours. This week, I felt much more myself both physically and mentally.

I was able to jump back in and help with Toyota Policy Drivers. Toyota Policy Drivers is a community of thousands of Toyota team members across America working together to protect and promote Toyota and the U.S. auto industry. We (LGND) built the first Policy Drivers site on the Quorum platform several years ago. But there were some limitations that led to this new project of building their site in WordPress and then integrating the Quorum functionality that they needed.

I started working on this project in December before taking time off at the end of the year. I picked it back up in early January for a couple of weeks before being interrupted by mom’s passing and being sick with COVID-19.

I was able to help get the site over the finish line by addressing several issues that were uncovered in the QA process before we soft-launched the site at the end of the week. We determined that the entire development team, six team members, touched some aspect of this project. The project consisted of the main WordPress site, which I was involved in, and a gamification element called Star Quest.

Star Quest is a collaboration between our animation/video team and our interactive developer Andy. This is the fourth year that we have built a custom game program that has boosted engagement by challenging Toyota’s Policy Driver community to unlock higher levels of the Star Quest game through grassroots advocacy participation.

We are thrilled by the positive feedback we have received from the Policy Driver team and excited to see how this project will continue to evolve.

  • I worked on an event template for the Energy Efficiency Hub. I will be building out an article template and report template over the next couple of weeks.
  • I started a new project on Friday for a maritime innovator. that has a quick turnaround as we are looking to launch it early next month.

I want to give a shout-out to our project management team. They really helped me to be successful in my first week back by limiting the amount of project work that was on my plate each day. I could tell that they made some purposeful decisions to ease my transition back into work.

I also appreciated the encouragement that I received from different teammates throughout the week. It is such a privilege to be a part of this supportive team.

CSS Trick – Flexbox borders

I have expanded the content below into a separate post with an updated solution.

As I was building out the new project on Friday, I was trying to figure out how to add some vertical borders within my flexbox layout. I wanted the borders to be flexible with the layout.

After thinking about some different ways I could add the borders, I decided I wanted them to be elements within the flexbox layout. So I created two empty divs in the layout and then tried to style them. But I was having trouble figuring out how to get the element to go the full height of the flexbox container.

I tried several different things and was not having any luck. So I decided to throw it out there to my development teammates on Slack. Brandon came back and asked me about using align-self: stretch on the two border elements.

As soon as I read it, I knew that was what I needed. This property is a default on Flex items so I don’t think I have ever had to add the stretch property in my code so it was not something that came to mind as I was looking for a solution. Because I had added align-items: center to the flex container, I need the stretch property on the border lines to make them stretch to fill the full height of the flex container.

Articles I read

Books I am reading

What I watched

  • Chiefs-Bengals AFC Championship Game (CBS) – I am excited that the Chiefs are returning to their third Super Bowl in four years. This was a tough one to watch. I thought the several missed opportunities by the Chiefs would be their downfall. I continued to be amazed at Patrick Mahomes.
  • All Creatures Great & Small: Season 3 (Prime) – We rewatched three episodes and then saw the fourth that aired this week.
  • The Great British Baking Show (Netflix)
  • Kim’s Convenience (Netflix)
  • Blue Bloods (CBS)
  • Bad Batch (Disney+)
  • Willow: Behind the Magic (Disney+)
  • Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Disney+)
  • New Amsterdam (Netflix) – I just started watching it this week.
  • The Elephant and the Termite (PBS)
  • Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, The Foundation (PBS)

Comments are closed.