Weeknotes 23:32

October 5, 2023

Week of September 24–30

The Elephant in the room

On Thursday, I found myself in an ambulance being transported to the ER. The day had started normal enough. About mid-afternoon, I was talking with my wife when she said I was looping in my conversation. Something was off. I was a bit confused and thought it was the end of August when the EMT was talking to me before they took me to the hospital.

The whole experience was a bit surreal. In some ways, I felt like a spectator even though I felt like I was there but I was not there quite completely. It was very humbling and sobering.

My blood pressure was high. I was there for several hours as they did a CT scan and x-ray. They gave me a low dose of medicine to address the high blood pressure. I was able to go home that night and was told to take it easy.

Things were still a bit foggy for me on Friday morning and I felt much more myself on Saturday. I contacted my team leadership and asked to take the coming week off to rest and recover. Once again, I am very grateful for our unlimited PTO policy.

I enjoyed watching Return of the King on Friday (one of my favorite movies). I played a lot of MLB The Show 23 and FIFA 22 on Saturday as I tried to take it easy and make sense of what had happened. It’s definitely a wake-up call.

I have known for a while that I need to take better care of myself. I had thought about starting to run again in the mornings but it would require getting up earlier and making changes to my morning routine. And I just kept putting it off.

We had planned to go to Murray, Kentucky on Friday to visit my son for Family Weekend at Murray State University. I made the trip last year and really enjoyed spending time with my son and feeling more connected to the university community. We had worked it out for my wife to go and my 2 daughters so we were really looking forward to spending time together as a family and enjoying some activities on campus. We were all disappointed and hope we can do it next year.

Quality Assurance Testing

I spent Wednesday doing quality assurance testing (QA) on a project that my teammate built. I started by testing in my preferred browser, Firefox. My first pass through the site was done with Figma open so that I could compare how the site build matched the design file. That phase of the testing took the longest.

Our team started using Marker earlier this year to log issues as we do QA. In the past, we have used GitHub issues and spreadsheets to log things that need to be fixed. Personally, I like GitHub issues because it is easy to have everything in one place and be able to check things off as they were addressed.

But we only have a limited number of accounts we can use on GitHub and clients don’t have access to it. So spreadsheets were more ubiquitous for everyone to use and access. But it is harder to keep track of completed actions in a spreadsheet and it is difficult to capture screenshots.

Marker is nice because anyone can access it, you can easily take and attach screenshots, and it captures information from the browser, which can be helpful with issues that are browser-specific. There is a WordPress plugin for Marker but it can also be added with JavaScript.

After the first pass comparing it to the Figma design, I tested it in other browsers. One of the challenges of testing in multiple browsers is the repetitiveness can lull you to miss things. However, I found that I found different things as I tested in different browsers, finding things I overlooked or that function differently when I clicked on links, buttons, or other inactive features.

I have Parallels on my Mac so that I can test the site in Edge, Chrome, and Firefox on a PC. I don’t have Apple devices so I use the simulators that are a part of XCode. I will often double-check with teammates who own those devices if I have any questions about things I may find in the simulator that I didn’t expect. Safari’s “responsive mode” can also be a helpful tool to diagnose iOS issues.

I also tested on my Android phone and tablet because I own those physical devices. I also utilized Browserstack to test on Android devices that I don’t have access to.

Most of the QA testing is to find bugs or issues where the site does not match the design or function properly. We (LGND) also use QA to suggest alternate solutions or ways to polish some aspects of the site to make the work more premium.

Accessibility

I also jumped into this project to help out with accessibility. I added :focus styles to different elements of the page to improve keyboard navigation. I tested the site using Lighthouse in Chrome and axe DevTools® extension in Firefox. I also tested to make sure that the site limited motion/animation for users with prefers-reduced-motion enabled.

State of HTML survey

I started to take part in the first State of HTML survey last week. I was not familiar with a lot of the features that are part of the survey. It made me realize that I have not kept as up-to-date with changes in HTML as I have with CSS. Some of that may be due to the fact that those newer features are just not things that are helpful in the kind of projects that I am building.

It is humbling to take a survey where you find yourself answering that you are not aware of that feature. I am almost tempted to not finish that survey. But I know it will be helpful for those who put it together and it will be helpful to me to add many of those items to the reading list that I can build through the functionality of the survey.

Articles I read

The Athletic

What I watched

Books I am Reading

What I played

MLB The Show 23 (Rays) – I went 5-1 this week. It was nice to be home in Tropicana Field.

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