Weeknotes 5
(2 minutes reading time)
These always seem to end up getting published a few days after a week has ended. Anyway, some highlights:
I spotted that the designers were running an awesome event, Design at GDS careers evening for people from under-represented groups. I’d seen a few of them tweet this out, and not only is the idea of this great but really the event activities is mind blowingly good. I mentioned this to our head of engineering and wanting to organise the same for engineering, but he seemed to think we’d done something like this before.
But I disagree.
I think uniquely, the designers are looking at this as an activity to improve diversity at GDS specifically. They are also running this as an event that gives back to the wider community. For example the first activity is a portfolio review.
The last event tech ran was an open house event, where you come along for a couple of talks and get a tour of our offices. This doesn’t do the two things above. We’re relying on people believing how great GDS are (and we are, I’m not being modest here) but the User Centred Design Team are being awesome. Show, don't tell.
Anyway, they did say “Sounds great - let’s do one”. That’s the kind of awesome support here.
Meanwhile I fixed an issue with the error feedback in Smart Answers in being not very friendly. This was a nice, little bit of coding I managed to squeeze in and quite enjoyed.
I also bumped the colours to the newer, higher contrast ones that on Calculators.
I also wrote up a ton of cards in Trello for our next phase of work, being to get all of the frontend apps using the new colours, base font size (switching to rem).
It wasn’t a completely smooth week. Somehow, my MacBook (and those of others) had Xcode removed by JAMF. To any devs out there who work on a Mac, this obviously means your machine is useless for dev work.
The fix is to upgrade to Mojave (yes I know it’s a year old, don’t get me started…) and then install Xcode. Except I couldn’t! Neither from the Managed Self Service tool or via Apple’s own App Store. In the end I had to revert to running the trusty old command:
xcode-select --install
My gripe is with trying to manage Macs in an “enterprise” manner. Just don’t. Macs are not designed to be interfered with. They’re designed to be simple, productive devices. More often than not, JAMF gets in the way. Yes I get that you need to have a base level of security, and yes there’s risk and cost from the impact of potential incidents. But no one is bothering to count the cost to productivity of having to get these things fixed when it, often, goes wrong.