Work Note

First, another apology dear reader. I said I wouldn’t say again but I will: wow, so sleepy! This week started strong on the sleep front but fell off a cliff toward the end of the week. I was knocked more than would be expected by negative news at work.

• Since the pandemic picked up our team has been down a senior member and working reduced hours, for a total 32.5% reduction in team hours.
• It was supposed to be temporary but we’ve learnt that our team member won’t be replaced. Despite hiring elsewhere we’ll remain down 25% for the foreseeable.
• Our team of 3 own ~100 projects of varying sizes, from individual front end components to chunky services. They’re used across the FT Group. As a tiny team we deliver outsized value. I worry that value is diminishing, starting slowly but picking up pace, as we’re unable to offer our usual support whilst finding time to innovate effectively on our foundations.
• Treading water for a(nother) year does not align with my ambitions — and definitely not those of the product teams who depend on our work — so what to do?
• There are options. We aim to increase design consistency and reduce the time teams spend repeating work. We want teams sharing and building on each others good work. So a large part of our job (often the best part 💛) is to support and coordinate the work of other teams. If we can take collaboration further, including secondments to our team and more cross-group effort on shared projects, that could be beneficial in a number of ways.
• It’s hard to stay positive though, morale is way low. My thoughts and feelings aren’t cohesive yet either. I’ll try writing them down in private, I think, to help figure out my options.
• Working reduced hours has given me time to work on personal projects again. Like setting up these weeknotes, learning TypeScript, that kind of thing. This week I did make some progress migrating a personal project to TypeScript but, mostly, I ended up watching Pokémon.
• Including the episode where Giovanni battles Gary with Mewtwo – so cool – I can finally place the movie within the series.
• Aside: Did you see a Pokémon card sold for £173,000 this week? A shiny Charizard. Somewhere at my parents there could be a small fortune in an old shoe box.
• It was nice to give up on productivity that day. Sometimes you've just got to mooch, huh? I'm definitely going to lean into mooching this weekend. Flails arms around at the world, gestures in the direction of bullet 1 and 2.
• In not unrelated news the jar of speculoos spread is nearly empty again. I swear it can't be just me running it down. It probably is.
• If you'd actually like to get your shit together I highly recommend Arjun's article The Art of Getting Your Shit Together 😂
• Oh! Seamless tangent to the best update. Inspired by Bake Off I put my sourdough to a new use. Bagels! They turned out really well. In other bread news I've also managed to get my chapatis puffing up nicely 🎉
• And don't get me started on the most excellent dal I made last week. Don't. This is a week note. Not a last week note. You'll have to wait until I make it again to know what's so special.
• Usually I'll sprinkle in a few helpful learnings of the week but I'm not sure I've got much for you today. Although I saw Jake Archibald shared an article to demonstrate an interesting characteristic of the CSS visibility property. "If you set an element to display: none the browser ignores all of its children, if a child sets itself to display: block it will remain hidden. This isn't true of visibility." What that means is you can reveal elements within an invisible parent element. Checkout the demo in Jake's article. It wins the most oddly satisfying button of the week award.
• Quick note on my notes. Thank you to the person who told me they love my week notes. There's no tracking on my site so its nice to hear someone reads them — and even likes them!
• With that, I'm out of here. I have an appointment with the sofa, comfort food, and old tv.
• See ya. 💛