It's amazing what a long break can do for the body and the mind. It was a nice Easter holiday and greatly received. I spent some time in the garden, got a bike for some rides in the park. I had the odd gym session but mainly spent the time in and around home. It almost never happens in the UK, but in the South West of London, we had 4 days of sunshine and a mild breeze, so I can't complain! This inevitably meant a shorter following work week, so there won't be too much to cover here.
General Work Summary
- Proof-reading org submission document.
- Progress on outstanding tickets as much as possible (we are short-staffed this week due to the Easter break)
- Learning about APIs with hoppscotch.io and dummy data to test HTTP methods.
- Prepared a wireframe hand sketch and then followed up with a figma design. This is for an apprenticeship task to produce a single page site keeping track of the project tasks and evolution through Trello Scrum or KanBan boards.
- I developed some optioneering UI for a multi-lingual form to be utilised on the site. It was designed on Miro dashboard and was pleasantly surprised it can also fulfill wireframing capabilities. Hopefully, the designs garner useful feedback from the team that requires the form.
- I prepared more notes on one of our teams pet projects which we are looking to upgrade. Currently, we have a third party software that performs machine learning on applicant submissions regarding a competition that the organisation runs. The model returns a score based on keyword search, word length and numbers used. The team would like the software to be integrated into the CMS rather than a standalone system. Also, the UI and performance of the software needs improvement. The elephant in the room is the model itself. We need to dive deep into the guts of the model, how ratings are calculated and how best to improve the model learning to make each rating calculation more effective year-in year-out. Easier said than done....
- Our Drupal one-to-one sessions are getting more interesting: we went through several ways to spin up a local Drupal site and the benefits of each. We are currently working through a setup on AWS and it is proving challenging! More to come on this!
- After a long hiatus, I was back on the Frontend Mentor Challenges. This time, it was a card component for a rating selector and return submission card. It took me several hours spread over 3 to 4 evenings after work where I could spare the time. In the end, I had to look up someone else's solution to see how the interactive rating (DOM manipulation) was implemented. Suffice to say, I need more practice on this particular topic of JS!