Weeknotes 19:18

November 18, 2019

Week of November 10-16

Decided I am going to do a more casual post this week.

  • I enjoyed a day off on Monday for Veteran’s Day. My company works with a lot of government agencies so we follow the federal calendar. In the morning, I went to Bryan College with my wife and youngest to see a Sentimental Journey. In the afternoon, I took a walk and took some pictures of the fall colors. And then enjoyed getting to play around with Notion. I have been considering moving from Evernote to it. But after playing around with it, I decided that I am going to stick with Evernote for the time being.
  • On Tuesday, I decided to give Disney+ a try. I will share more about that later in the post.
  • I juggled a lot of different projects this week. I worked on 5 different sites and had a meeting about making updates to another one.
  • I ended up getting pulled off of one project that is mostly done so I can give my attention to another project.
  • I am really excited about that second project although I am concerned about the timeline. Development so far has seemed to go really slow. I believe it is because I am having to make a lot more layout decisions that I normally have to. One of the reasons I am excited about it is that it has some challenging layouts and I see opportunities to use some CSS techniques that I have not used before.
  • I ended up having a discussion with Ryan, the other developer on my team, about best practice for using a h1 tag. Somewhere along the way, I got into the habit of using only one per page (usually for the page title). I think I picked up the habit from Andy Clarke’s Transcending CSS. I know with HTML 5 and sectioning, the intent was that we could use multiple h1 on a page. But I also know that there were some things that never were implemented by the browsers so I continued to only use one per page and use multiple h2 tags for each section. I am hoping to put together a post with some more thoughts and links. Most of the things that come up in a Google search are three years or older.
  • I finished one book I was reading, started and finished a shorter book, and started reading Creativity, Inc. for a team book club. I had set a goal to read 24 books this year. I have read 19. Not sure if I will make it to my goal or not.
  • I reminisced about the Refresh ’06 Conference that I attended 13 years ago. I really enjoyed the conference which was in my backyard in Orlando. I met a lot of talented people and started following many of the industry leaders that have shaped my practice of the craft. It is the only conference I have ever commuted to. I do feel like I missed out on the nightlife, which I have enjoyed at some other conferences where I stayed at the hotel. The Refresh Conference is a significant marker in my journey as a Web practitioner.
  • I also thought about the MAX 2003 conference that I attended during this time 16 years ago. The MAX conference was my first Web conference. I attended the conference with a couple of other guys from my company at the time. We had a lot of fun exploring Salt Lake City at night. And I was really inspired by all the different people I heard from. My first encounter with UIE was at a seminar at the MAX conference. I attended two of their UI conferences in the years following.

Thoughts on Disney+

  • I am really excited about having access to Disney’s vault, to Star Wars and to Marvel. There are a lot of older Disney movies from my childhood that I am looking forward to watching again.
  • The software has been a bit buggy, at least on PS4. We had trouble getting closed captions to work on our PS4 when we wanted to watch Mandalorian on Tuesday night. But it worked fine on our Fire Stick. There have been some other little things like error messages that say you can’t access this video right now but if you keep trying, it will work.
  • I miss having a feature of “continue watching” as I enjoy on Netflix. And as of right now, the interface does not indicate things you have already watched. So I have to remember each time which episodes of Rebels we last watched. I anticipate that they will add these features as they go along.
  • It is interesting that the Web interface using Slick Carousel. It is an open-source software that I use on my projects.
  • We have really enjoyed The Mandalorian.
  • For the most part, I have been pretty forgiving about the little annoyances with the interface. I expect that it will get better over time. And I know first-hand the pressure to get things done on a strict timeline and how sometimes you have to launch with just good enough and add the polish in the aftermath.

Mozilla Developer Videos

I continue to enjoy the Mozilla Developer Videos. They release 2-3 a week. Last weeks’ videos focused on accessibility and Firefox’s Accessibility Inspector.

Reading

 

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