Week Notes 4
This week started nice and quiet. It’s a "reading week" at the university, so I’ve had a break from my usual Monday lectures. It was nice to have a slower start to the week instead of wrestling rush hour traffic. Even though I enjoy lecturing, I’m glad it’s a temporary arrangement. It’s only one day a week, but it messes with my flexible schedule which is frustrating.
I also started the week by publishing Developurrs #11! I’ve had a little break from the project, but have still being running interviews over the holiday period. There’s a really good mix of people in this second half, of which some I’ve been hugely inspired by throughout my career. I’m also happy to feature some folks who don’t have a huge Twitter presence to hopefully give them a little boost.
I’m running the second half of the project differently. Instead of weekly publishing, I’m just going to publish articles when I can, instead. I’ve got a lot of work on at the moment and editing posts is very time consuming. I’m trying to prevent myself from spinning too many plates and burning out again.
The rest of the week has been focused on getting this new design system I’m working on configured and ready to start building components.
I’ve really enjoyed using Gulp as the bundler. I chose Gulp because I’ve got a lot of experience with it and the bundling requirements of this project are quite complex, to the point that in my opinion, a webpack config might get a bit unwieldy. I also want the barrier to entry of this project to be really low, to make sure the design system remains as a healthy, central source of truth.
I finished the week doing what I love doing: setting up design tokens, ready for a big push on the components next week.
I also added the final bits of spit and polish to the new Scott’s Bass Lessons homepage and navigation rollout, which happens on Monday lunchtime. This is the first release of a gradual redesign MVP, that’s design system led. A lot of work has gone into getting the project to this point, so I’m looking forward to seeing it go live, even if it isn’t quite perfect yet.
P.S. I ♥️ reading other folk’s week notes, so if you’re also writing them, please send me a link to them!
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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.