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BlogWeek in Review2025Week in Review: 17th Feb - 23rd Feb

Week in Review: 17th Feb - 23rd Feb

Monday

  • Spent some time with Milo this morning before work.
  • First day back in the office after 5 weeks paternity leave. Tough to say goodbye before cycling in to work.
  • Morning standup, nothing much has changed since I’ve been away. Nice to see familiar faces again.
  • Spend the day catching up on emails, teams messages and getting my dev environemnt setup. The usual broken setup with WSL not working, some networking issue.
  • Wnet for a walk with Ben around the lake at lunch. He seems quite positive about how the company is performing. Apparently financials were strong for the last year, I’m not sure that is reflected in the overall mood.
  • Picked up an MR that I didn’t get to finish beofre pat leave. I’m refactoring how we check for enabled features into a context so that we can just pull enabled features from the context instead of having to call the api in each component reducing the amount of code across the application.
  • Tried to test it but there are some jest config issues which don’t warrent a fix at this point in time.
  • I’d definitely like to improve my testing, and feeling more comfortable in general around writing good tests.
  • Gym way too busy, went home instead and went for a run. Did some hill sprints for a change which felt great.
  • Looked after Milo whilst Tash cooked dinner. We call between 6 and 10pm the witching hour because he goes a bit crazy. Managed to settle him eventually before we had dinner.
  • Bought the greatfrontend course. Apparently you get all your money back if you write a review on your website/make a video about it so I thought why not. Still to early to have an opinion about it, seems like a fair bit of pre-able.
  • Played a tiny bit of guitar and then bed.

Tuesday

  • Woke up early to look after Milo. We had a nice cuddle and then went for a walk. I tried speaking Spanish to him whilst he was asleep in the carrier, not sure I’m making it enough of a habit yet.
  • Had breakfast and then cycled into work. Very quiet in the office again. I caught up on MRs, still trying to get my context work over the line. Everything moves a bit slower when you’ve had some time off.
  • Went to the gym at lunchtime with James and we crushed a leg session. They are far and few between at the moment making doms considerably worse but it still feels great to get a workout in.
  • Cycled home to see

Wednesday

Thursday

  • Took Milo in the morning. Made more progress on greatfrontend.com . I covered a the UI cheatsheet which covered topics like:
    • Component Organisation: ( container/presentational pattern). Split your data fetching from your presentational components.
    • State Design: Use of hooks, splitting data management from rendering
    • User experience: Mobile design, error states, image handling, optimistic rendering
    • Network: Reflect network states in the UI, Race conditions, aborting requests, consolidating requests (debounce, batch, timeouts, optimistic updates)
    • Accessibility: Screen readers, aria roles, states and properties. Keyboard interactions. Visual considerations. Edge cases (empty states, long strings, lists)
    • Performance: Throttle debounce, caching, on demand loading, prefetch, lists
    • Security: Cross-site scripting (XSS): Involved someone injecting js script into the frontend code. Avoid using certain methods like Element.innerHTML or Reacts dangerouslySetInnerHTMl when rendering contents into the DOM. Encode URL contexts (if creating dynamic url from user input), prevent unintended values from URL. Cross site request forgery.
    • Internationalisation: Does UI work in multiple languages? Avoid hard coding labels in certain languages, handle long strings, right to left languages.
  • Working day was a complete waste of time. I had networking issues all day meaning I couldn’t pull from our remote repos. I also couldn’t run my debugger locally (unrelated but meant I wasn’t up to date with develop). Spent most of the day trying to get it working (it was all fine before going on pat leave).
  • Tash and I took Milo for our usual walk in the evening. Brain was kaput after looking at my terminal all day.
  • We ate dinner and then went to bed.

Friday

  • More progress on greatfrontend.com  whilst looking after Milo.
  • Worked from home. Again more networking issues, seems like more people at work are experiencing issues. IT sent out email saying they are trying to resolve.
  • I caught up with Andy and Andrew which was nice. Andrew showed us his progress on Atlas and then we had out 1-1. We talked about fatherhood and covered some FE concepts in more depth such as Accessibility and Internationalisation which was interesting. They are definitely problems you are more likely to work on in a public facing website, which Andrew worked on in his previous role.
  • Went to my last physio session. Bumped into Ella who was also there. Went through some running specific workouts/warm ups that should help me engage my muscles and help with mind/muscle engagement such as A/B skips, bounds, wall climbers etc. Need to incorporate these as a run warm up. Couple of tests showing that I am still quite off balance so something else I can work on.
  • Got home feeling positive about my leg/recovery so went for a quick run before dinner.
  • Watched another episode of black doves before going to bed.

Saturday

  • Caught up on weeks notes which I fell behind on whilst looking after Milo.
  • Made breakfast and got ready to head into town.
  • Met up with Chuy and Natalie who we hadn’t seen in a while. We had a lovely catchup over coffee at Nottingham Contemporary and then walked around the exhibition. Chuy and I walked around whilst he quizzed me on Spanish words. My Spanish is getting quite rusty…
  • Walked home via the post office in time to watch Ireland vs Wales and then England Vs Scotland. Both fantastic games, Ireland dominating in the second half and England clinching the win for the Calcutta Cup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcutta_Cup 
  • Spent the evening carrying Milo around the house and cooking dinner.

Sunday

  • Had a cuddle with Milo for about an hour whilst he slept then he fed a bit and I took him out for a walk to the shops. Picked up things for breakfast and lunch.
  • Had breakfast and made coffee for Tash and did some chores around the house. Mostly washing.
  • Went out into the garden for almost three hours. Mostly weeding and prepping soil making sure everything is ready for planting. Pretty happy with how things are looking. Just need to do a pass on the rockery and then keep everything under control in spring. Still need to sow sweet peas, tomatoes and radishes but didn’t have any compost.
  • Cooked lunch and watched Italy vs France. Incredible game again, so many points on the board. France really dominating hard to see how they lost to England in the previous game.
  • Put up the coat hanger that got pulled down whilst people were visiting last week. Decided to reuse the same holes by finding a bigger plug, luckily I had some old ones that were just right. Tidied up and did a few more chores (hoovering and bins, fun).
  • Managed to squeeze a quick ride in, 21st out of around 200 people on a Cat C ride. Happy with that again. Caught up with messages whilst doing a light stretch.
  • Tash cooked dinner which was delish as always.
  • Rest of evening was just getting ready for bed and week ahead.

What I’m Reading

📖 The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

What I’m Watching

📺 Black Doves

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