Week Notes 3
This week has been a hell of a week.
I started off as I do most weeks, lecturing at the University. I finally managed to get through the 80 assignments that I had to mark, too, which was a massive relief. It got very close to me having to do a load of marking in the evenings which wouldn’t have been cool at all.
The main part of the week has been spent starting a new project with Clearleft where I’m helping out with some HTML, CSS and Vue JS on a design system/pattern library project. This is my second project with them. They’re a great bunch of folks who are currently hiring (go and work for them).
Starting this new project meant I had a trip to Brighton for kick-off meetings. While I was down there, I popped along to Codebar Brighton and did a bit of coaching. I had a great time, working with a student who’s doing design at Uni who also wanted to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I really enjoy mentoring folks like this on DevPal and it was great to do it in person, too. If you live in Brighton and want to help people learn the web, you should definitely pop along to one of the weekly workshops to help folks out. It's a great organisation, run by great people.
For this new project, it’s all been about planning. One of the parts of that process was taking some very comprehensive design assets, printing them out and then slicing component families out to group together on the whiteboard. That means I can then spend time looking through the families and identifying small, shared components, which get put into one massive Trello board as a reference-point. The benefit of this approach is that you get some logical grouping for your design system. It's also very clear to everyone involved what elements do what and what components are related to each other, so the risk of duplicating CSS is reduced. I’ll probably write about this process in more detail, soon as it’s really helpful. You really can’t do enough planning at this stage in a project.
Lastly, I’ve decided to change the format of these week notes because the daily thing just wasn’t working out for me. I much prefer this loose article style instead.
Have a good week, everyone 🚀
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Things I’ve found (or made) throughout the week:
Hi 👋, I’m Andy — an educator and web designer
I produce front-end development tutorials over at Front-End Challenges Club and Piccalilli. You can sign up for updates on Piccalilli to stay up to date with its progress.