Weeknotes 009

This was a bit of a tough week, we’re in the last moments of preparation before a soft launch of the project I’ve been working on and the 80:20 rule is in full effect.

The last 20% of the work, polishing, bug fixing, testing has taken, if not 80% of our time, maybe 80% of our attention. A bit of a stark reminder that as fast as things can feel early on, the progress inevitably tapers out and takes place beneath the surface. It’s easy to feel productive and positive when things are moving fast, the trick is keeping that up when things slow down and get tricky.

The week started with a task no designer loves, designing and coding up an email invitation. While browser-based HTML and CSS has progressed with many generations of web standards, accessibility and the maturing of web technologies, email has stayed stuck in the past. There are very few standards and different email clients handle code quite differently so there’s a big dependency on testing. Thankfully, tools like Litmus, while pricey, make testing across a broad spectrum of clients possible. But one big difference from doing this a few years ago that is the the addition of Large Language Model AIs.

While AI remains largely a four letter word round these parts it has been really useful as a sense checker and quality assurance partner. I used it to review the code I was writing for known quirks and limitations of email rendering and it suggested alternative approaches and pointed out errors. It took some of the pain out of the task and made the work a lot quicker. Arguably this is what AI is best placed to help with - taking the pain away from tricky tasks.

Another job I’ve been working on wrapped this week, a bit of graphic design for a local event, which I’ll share as soon as it gets published. It was extremely fun to fire up photoshop again and test my creative side.

If you know me, you may have spotted the contrast in what I’m doing now I’m freelance, versus what I’ve been doing the past few years. Namely, returning to an individual contributer type role, rather than carrying on in leadership. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. I don’t know where I’m pitching myself at the moment but I’m taking freelance as an opportunity to explore my options. I’ll write more about this soon.

Watching

The Diplomat - I absolutely loved this, and it filled to some extent the deep hole the West Wing left in my life. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the West Wing, but it’s fun and it scratched the itch

Listening

Birds in a Row – Gris Klein. French Hardcore Punk, if that sounds like your thing this will definitely be your thing

Reading

I finished Children of Time Book one, I really enjoyed it, absolutely brilliant world building and a great set up for the next in the series. I haven’t jumped right into book two just yet. I’m taking a break returning to Rick Rubin’s ‘The Creative Act’, which I started over a year ago.

As well as this I’ve been listening to Isaac Steele and the Forever Man on Audible, written by Daniel Rigby who you may have seen playing the son in Flowers. It’s very tongue in cheek, very British Sci-fi and really funny.