Weeknotes 23:39

November 25, 2023

Week of November 12–18

Updated OS to Sonoma

I spent a good portion of the day on Wednesday updating my OS from Monterrey to Sonoma. I am hesitant to upgrade operating systems after a bad experience several years ago. I downloaded a corrupted file that significantly slowed down my computer. I did not have the time to reinstall because of the volume of project work so I made due. Several months later, I joined LGND full-time and was provided a company computer which solved my problem.

I am also hesitant because of the time investment that it use to take me to get back up and running once I upgraded. I use the run a local development environment with a LAMP stack and I always had to configure the new PHP software to recreate the environment I needed. Things are much better today as I run my local web development through Local and it is not the time investment that it use to be.

I learned from experience that it is better to wait until the new operating system has a few updates so that the kinks are worked out and problems with other software programs working well have been ironed out.

And I really can’t remember the last time that I was really excited with the “new” features of a new operating system. So in the end, the cost to upgrade has outweighed the benefits so updating has not been a priority.

I decided that now was the time to update as support because I was two versions behind. I was also motivated by some light shaming from one of my teammates. I had time available since I was waiting to start a new project. I don’t like upgrading during projects in case I do encounter a problem and I cannot afford delays in giving attention to those projects.

I finally started backing up my computer with Time Machine this year so I ran a backup (I had been using Smart Backup to copy essential files). After running a manual backup in Time Machine to make sure it was up-to-date, I decided to also back up files with Smart Backup. That took a bit longer because I had not run a Smart Backup since moving onto Time Machine.

I also decided to export all of my Local projects so that I could easily get back up and running with it in case something went wrong during the upgade. I probably didn’t need to do that because of Time Machine but it gave me peace of mind.

I was finally ready to upgrade. I downloaded Sonoma and started to run the upgrade. But I was told that I did not have enough free space on my hard drive. I ran some clean up tasks in Clean My Mac and deleted some old projects files (mostly Sketch files) that I no longer needed. And then I waited as the new operating system was installed.

The update was a success. I had to update some system settings and decided to use a different screen saver that worked better with the new OS. I did have to contact support for Shift as the app would not let me update preferences or do anyting from the menu bar. Their support team was quick to get back to me with a fix, using the beta version of the software that contained a fix. All and all it was a smooth update without a lot of noticeable changes overall.

Starting a new project

I was excited to start a new project on Thursday. I am building a new page for the Toyota Policy Driver‘s site that we launched earlier this year. LGND has worked with Toyota since 2020 to supercharge its advocacy program with custom gamification experiences–which makes employee engagement fun and rewarding.

Toyota employees complete actions on the site, such as listening to a podcast, watching a video, writing a letter to a member of Congress, or taking a quiz to earn points to unlock new levels of the game. I am building a hub for the 2024 gamification experience, Adventure Quest.

The new page will display the user’s progress, allow them to unlock new rewards, and see their collection of rewards as they progress through the game. The page will include Lottie animations, video, and static elements to create a new game experience for 2024.

The users will unlock doors to reveal different relics that they earn. The doors interface is a carousel with the “active” door in the middle. It has a “cover flow” effect that gives the carousel depth.

I hit a snag at the end of the day on Friday when I was recreating the carousel in my WordPress codebase from a prototype I had worked on a couple of weeks ago. But the carousel was “broken” in my WordPress site. After some research, I realized that the carousel script (Swiper) in my prototype was using a much older version of Swiper and the effect worked differently in the current version.

I had built my prototype as a fork of another Codepen. I was upset with myself that I had not taken the time to realize that that pen had been built over five years ago.

I don’t like running into problems at the end of the day, especially on a Friday, that I don’t have time to solve and wrap up before I quit for the day. But that can also be a good thing because it forces you to put it aside. I have found that many times the best way to come up with a solution is to step away from the problem and come back to it later.

Articles I read

Books I am reading

What I watched

A better image reset for CSS (Kevin Powell)

New approach to containers and wrapper classes (Kevin Powell) – As I was posted this, I noticed that Kevin has already come up with a newer approach to solve this problem.

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