Weeknotes 2022 #49

Better late than never.

Clearleft HQ

Jeremy kicked off the week by giving another run-through of his Declarative Design talk. He was soon to be heading to San Fransisco to drop wisdom on the An Event Apart audience. Sounds like it went well. It’s a superbly layered talk which is worthy of a place on your watchlist.

Listen to early versions of talks such as this and being able to give constructive feedback is definitely one of the many benefits of working at Clearleft. Anyone can schedule a talk to share something of interest or benefit to the wider company.

I took the opportunity to run a session this week called Hell is Other People’s Shared Drives. I shared some of the pitfalls of working with Google Drive and offered some suggestions that have helped me find files, navigate folders and future-proof the amazing work we do at Clearleft. I was honestly surprised to have as many people attend as I did and received some enthusiastic feedback.

I ran a sourdough bread-making workshop on Thursday for Luke and Chris at Clearleft HQ. It was challenging to find gaps in their diaries to step through the process and the temperature had also dropped dramatically in Brighton which might have slowed the fermentation process. Regardless, they both baked a stonking fist loaf.

I wrapped up the week on Friday by writing a few paragraphs for an upcoming Clearleft’s Best Bits of 2022 blog post. It was a really nice opportunity to reflect on the year and what I’m excited about for 2023.

Pick and Mix

• Linn Vizard shared some good tips for reducing no-show rates for design researchers
• Erika Hall’s solid and thorough A Design Research Framework
• I lost my Duolingo streak 😭️
• My son’s school report arrived this week. I was very pleased to see the use of inclusive language and pronouns. Progress was positively-framed as “does well in… even better if…”. I think I’m going to borrow this for gathering my own feedback
• Andy shared a web version of Teletext. Apparently you can run the service on a Raspberry Pi and connect it to your TV.
• Raspberry Pi made an announcement about a new hire. The maker community voiced their genuine concerns on Mastodon. Someone described what happened next as ‘the first brand-implosion on Mastodon’. For a fascinating objective view of what unfolded and a great introduction to principles of the Fediverse read this article by Aurynn Shaw
• I was disheartened to read about a closed-minded approach to accessibility by Sublime Text and it’s community, so I’m now looking for an alternative open source IDE to use
• Over the weekend my son and I started catching up on The Pi Hut’s Maker Advent Calander, we then spent some time sketching out a design for his website and designing in the browser with CSS