Weeknotes 21:14

September 14, 2021

Week of September 5 - 11

Started New Project – Roadmap for Canadian-US Embassy

I started a new project this week. I am building a special section for Connect2Canada (the Canadian Embassy in the US). The new section will outline a roadmap to building a better relationship between our two countries in 6 different areas. I decided to build it so we could re-use the layout in the future. The navigation will be completely dynamic built through child pages.

Saying Hello and Goodbye to LGND Teammates

LGND welcomed 2 new teammates, Briana and Taylor, this past week, both working on our project management team. I have been enjoying getting to know Briana as I have served as her onboarding buddy during her first weeks. During daily Zoom calls, we have gotten to know each other and I was able to answer different questions that she has had about our team and our work processes. I look forward to working with both Briana and Taylor in the coming weeks and months.

And at the end of the week, we said goodbye to Katherine, who is moving on to new adventures. I had worked closely with Katherine on the Resolve to Save Lives: Epidemics That Didn’t Happen project earlier this year. I really enjoyed our collaboration on that one. I wish her the best of luck in her new endeavors.

The Value of Play

I really enjoyed a team gathering we had on Friday. About 6 of us played a couple of different games on JackBox. It was a great time of laughing and hanging out socially. It is such an important thing to do when working with a remote team. It was a great way to end the week.

Pain-point Addressed – WordPress ACF Image Solution

For almost 2 years, I have really desired an image solution for building sites in WordPress. I really wanted a way to be able to upload a higher resolution image with an Advanced Custom Field and have WordPress automatically create a 1x version (half the size) that I could use in my templates. This solution would allow me to use any image size and not have to define a bunch of different image sizes in WordPress in the functions.php file. This past week my wish became reality. Ryan developed a solution and we worked together to refine it. It looks for ACF that has “2x” in the label text. I used it for the first time on the Canada Roadmap project that I mentioned above. I am excited to finally have this solution in my tool belt.

TIL – isolation property

I recently learned about the CSS property isolation. It creates a new stacking context within the element that you apply the property to. Using isolation: isolate, I can create a stacking context that will allow me to use z-index: -1 on an element and not have that element disappear behind the body of the document. I used this on the Canada Roadmap project to have an image that serves as a background in an element that has a text box layered over the background image.

In the past, I have used z-index:1 on the image and then written a declaration to put z-index:2 on all the other siblings within the containing element. Using isolation has led to a more elegant solution with less code.

Online Reading

  • The New Puritans (The Atlantic) – Very interesting read about the current culture especially in academia but also on social networks. A very dangerous situation that I hope will begin to right itself in the years ahead.

Reading

  • The Lost Discipline of Conversation – Almost done with this one.
  • The Power of Trust – I finished this title today. Lots of good insights for companies and individuals on building trust and recovering trust when it is broken.
  • The Alliance – Almost done listening to this one. Just bought a physical, used copy off the Amazon Marketplace. Still intrigued but have a lot of questions on how to implement and how the idea of a tour of duty works with project-based work that have such different durations.

Watching

  • Manifest (Netflix) – I just started watching this on Monday. I have been reluctant to watch it thinking it might similar to other shows like Lost where you really never find out what is happening. I have watched about five episodes and it has really drawn me in so far. Wondering if it will be able to keep my attention over the long term.
  • Inspector Lewis (Prime Masterpiece Subscription) – Rewatching an old favorite with my wife. I really love the characters and the plots are not too easy to figure out.

Playing

  • FIFA20 (Rangers of Scottish Premier League) – I played several games over the Labor Day weekend but have not played this week.

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