Insanity Max 30—week 6

The first week of month two was hell. But I did way better in the second week which you can see in my times.

First week fail times: 7:01 9:49 7:51 10:42 8:35

Second week fail times: 9:17 10:43 10:01 10:48 11:45

Third week fail times: 17:15 7:14 12:01 8:15 11:43

Fourth week fail times: 19:14 10:44 12:12 11:10 12:15

Fifth week fail times: 8:20 5:55 4:52 6:01 5:58

Sixth week fail times: 12:50 12:21 7:52 7:52 6:20

I’ve noticed a difference in how I feel as well. Really hoping to squeeze out even better results in the last two weeks.

Making Angular forms behave

For quite a while I’ve been told Angular forms have to work in a certain way. For example, you have to validate errors as the user types or that you can’t validate a date input because the three separate inputs have to be validated together.

But this week, I’ve had a massive break through thanks to Franjo Zanki. In just a few hours he’s managed to make Angular forms work based on the established patterns and guidance in the GOV.UK Design System. He’s made me so happy!

And it’s also been really fun pairing with him to get the components working just right. It’s a positive reminder of how great things can be when we break down silos and work together.

Hiding elements the boring way

I setup a Twitter poll asking how users prefer to hide elements. By adding a class of hidden or by setting the style property on the element directly with el.style.display.

The best part of the poll was that a lot of people responded saying neither and that we should use the native [hidden] attribute for this. As I briefly explained on the thread [hidden] isn’t as well supported and could make some other things tricky.

This is something I’ve been meaning to write about for a very long time now. So note to self: write about it will ya!

Be boring

Chris Coyier asked his followers to share their favourite articles about boring development. There’s some really really good articles I don’t want to forget on there.

And Andy Bell mentioned The Boring Frontend Developer. Thanks Andy.

Mindsets: responsive design and accessible design

I’ve been chatting with Ed again this week. This time about the ways an experience can change on small and big screens. Specifically:

• do we hide content on small screens to avoid scrolling and keep things focused. The main downside meaning that mobile users don’t get the same features/content available to them degrading the experience in other ways.
• or, do we just let that content stack (or make it togglable) and keep things consistent with the same features on all screen sizes. The downside being potentially more scrolling and a less focused experience.

My problem with the former is that most designers do this to keep things looking good on small screens. I think they jump to this without considering whether it was really a problem for mobile user to literally flick past the now more prominent content.

Either way, this is another article I want to write about.

Tired of writing

Not a week(note) goes by where I don’t have something else I want to write about. But I’m also really tired of writing. Nobody makes me write but me. And that’s because despite how difficult I find it, I know how valueable it is.

Either way, I’m overwhelmed by the increasingly large number of Google Keep notes, Google doc and Dropbox Paper drafts, Github issues, tweets and weeknotes that I want to sort out.

And while I’m finding these weeknotes useful, they are also taking up my previous writing energy of doing the hard work of writing a proper finished article.