Weeknote #3

Whoa. Weeknote number three – I seem to be on a streak here, although I still have doubts about its longevity.

This week was turbulent. It started out great with a visit at the vet's where Obi-Wau was diagnosed with "no change" in his heart condition, meaning: no further deterioration of his heart valves in the last couple of months. Awesome! He's obviously still sick but at least the meds seem to have stabilized the status quo. We spent a lot of time playing outside and running off-leash to celebrate. 🐶🎉

A warm and sunny spring has come, left and returned this week. Bonn's cherry blossom is in full bloom by now and the annual maelstrom of tourists waltzes through the narrow Altstadt alleys. Temperatures dropped to 0°C yesterday and we even had a bit of snow, which probably means that the blossom will not be very long-lived this year.

Even though most of my time and energy was consumed by work, I found a bit of time to improve the partners display on Black Cab Cologne. I really want to get back to tinkering with Kirby 3.0 for my complete, multi-language rewrite of Jourmany. Alas, it's mostly content from here on out and there's a lot of that. 😬

Work#

My work week was dominated by our big focus project, to the point where I cancelled my attendance at the Chamber of Commerce's examining board for trainees. We've felt under pressure from our client for weeks to forecast and commit to a launch deadline, which was supposed to be next Tuesday. I spent most of my available time and effort on closing two pull requests (the last outstanding features), while the rest of the team was focused on preparing content migration workflows and creating launch checklists. We really doubled down on this project, updated our client contact in daily phone calls on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and reaffirmed the launch deadline on Thursday. Then Friday came along and our contact's boss called to inform us they had to postpone the launch due to missing internal approvals. Apparently, there is a two-tiered approval process in place that no one was consciously aware of, as well as a spontaneous need for some content restructuring and subsequent new approvals.

On the upside, I did fix a few things to keep me happy and carved out some time for Lukas to assist him with an accessible form he's building for the European Solidarity Corps.

TIL: Do not think that just because modern browsers support CSS flexbox for media type screen they will support it for print. Heavy sigh. I totally ran into this with both eyes open, having read Rachel's warning. Go me.

Reading#

I feel like I've read too much this week, especially in preparation for my upcoming UX talk on passwords. Now my mind is broke. Most of my reading was of the technical-articles-on-screen type, but I did also finish "Calamity" [Reckoners #3]. The very satisfying ending makes for a great trilogy. Speaking of trilogies, "Holy Sister" [Book of the Ancestor #3] came out and I'm about a hundred pages in. I'm taking this one slow because I want to enjoy it. And I'm reading it on paper!

Here's an incomplete and unsorted list of web things I read:

Nothing Fails Like Success by Jeffrey Zeldman is a must-read. He compares the current state of venture capital backed companies to a family that loaned from the Mob and now has to pay the price. Mike Davidson (former VP of Design at Twitter) responded with a longish twitter thread.

Accessibility Events by Mat Marquis is one of many great pieces that tackle the toxic new "feature" that is Apple's accessibility events. Let us not repeat our past mistakes and say "no" to this.

Then there was Unlike Kinds who actually suffer from lower page speed since they transitioned to Google's AMP. Their post is especially great if you – like me – are very sceptic of AMP and the intentions behind it.

Addy Osmani published Native image lazy-loading for the web!, a superb resource for the up-and-coming loading attribute which brings native <img> and <iframe> lazy-loading to the web. Rejoice! I can't wait to add this to our WebfactoryResponsiveImageBundle.

If you need a reminder why you might only be temporarily abled, Accessibility for Vestibular Disorders: How My Temporary Disability Changed My Perspective is for you. I read it and although I knew most of the points Facundo Corradini makes, I still felt I knew them a bit better afterwards.

I probably shouldn't have squeezed it in this week, but I also read the five-part series on Web Components on CSS-Tricks. Good stuff! I really need to find some time to dig into this exciting not-really-new-anymore part of modern frontend choices.

Also on CSS-Tricks: Chris' musings on the fact that even websites age. This ties in to a comment on Dave Rupert's unsolicited blogging advice where Evan Travers explained how he uses a changelog at the bottom of his posts to make edits and updates transparent. This is really neat! I want to do that and it should be possible, somehow, as each post here lives in a markdown-ish .txt file that is already under version control.

I also saved about 20-ish new bookmarks to my "security" folder during yesterday's research for my talk about the UX of passwords. More on that soon.

Did I mention my mind is broke?