Weeknotes  

Monday 05 Apr - Sunday 11 Apr 2021

Things I did

• I start a new role at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government next week, so I have been preparing, getting access to emails and that sort of thing. – Thank you to Paul, Matt and Ben.
• Got emotional watching the following COVID Vaccine related Google advertisement.
• This week I made a commitment with Gillian to make the most of the good weather by doing lots of walking in our local area, taking out Ted (our new puppy) to find new routes, especially in Heaton Park.
• Sporadically this week I found time to develop this website and sketch out what the content should be. I decided weeknotes would be a good habit to get into.
• I indulged my slight Nike addiction by nabbing a pair of JRDN MA2 sneakers

  

• Thursday I did more ‘life admin’. Its quite surprising how much less stressed I feel having sorted out an overcrowded cupboard in my home office, taken junk to the local recycling centre and for doing a bunch of other chores/to-do items that have been swirling around my brain for weeks. Such a relief.
• Installed the Code Spell Checker into VSCode to catch all my mistakes now that I’m writing again.

Things I read

• Building a user-centered data strategy from 18F – I really liked the questions they used for researching the needs around data.
• Planning for the future – proposals for reform of the planning system in England.
• I stumbled upon’Why am I talking?’ a post by Tom Barrett and it very much resonated. If you want improve dialogue in your working life, read it and then share it.
• Preloading critical assets - A recap on a technique I could employ to improve the page performance on this site. Namely, preloading the fonts I use.
• Having recently left the world of grant making, I very much enjoyed ‘#GrantMakingMemes’ twitter account this week. Very funny and a good way of highlighting common issues and complaints in a very important sector of the world. Excellent work Tom and Gemma!

And that was my very first ‘weeknote’.

Typically these will be about my working week, I think my audience will be people I’m working with or who are interested in Interaction Design, User Research and Service Design in the public sector.

This week because I’m currently between jobs, I’m using this weeknote to kick the tyres of the code I have written to present them and to get a feel for writing again.

Over the next few weeks I’m sure I will change the design based on feedback as well as play with the format from week to week.

I’d love to hear any comments or feedback. What would you like me to write about? Drop me a line on Twitter.