Weeknotes #6

User flows and prototypes

Work continued with prototyping the image flows this week. Its been great seeing the team come together around design. We each seem to be focusing on our roles, and I’m finding it easier to let go of trying to do everything.

Accessibility - keyboard behaviour

As a team we’re trying to focus on doing everything we can on being accessible. I noticed a list component that didn’t have keyboard behaviour. I spent some time reading the specs and discussing the behaviour with one of our developers Dan. He’s become a bit of an advocate an seems to enjoy trawling through the specs to ensure we get things right.

Whilst we’re not there with a completely accessible app, we are heading in the right direction.

Download a site and convert to Markdown

I spent some time this week exploring ways of converting an existing web site into Markdown. I had already used the open source document convertor Pandoc. So I needed a way to download an existing site, clean up the markup and pass it through Pandoc.

The command line is powerful, and there are a lot of tools to complete the necessary steps. I’m not averse to the command line, but don’t use it regularly enough. Within a couple of hours I was able to come up with a solution.

• Downloaded a site using CURL
• Passed it through a HTML Parser called Pup to extract some of the HTML
• Used Pandoc to create clean version of the HTML in Markdown.

I enjoyed the challenge and whilst I need to write a more detailed post on the steps involved getting my hands and head in the terminal was a useful exercise.

Backlog grooming and product board

As a product owner a large percentage of my time should be spent keeping the backlog groomed. And should have tasks defined ready for upcoming sprints. This has been affected by the other work I’ve been involved with over the last few weeks so I had some catching up to do.

I managed to get rid of a swathe of old dormant tasks and bugs that were no longer relevant. The backlog looked much cleaner ready for our return of the company holiday.

I also took some time to review feedback in productboard and assign the various notes to features. Productboard is definitely helping to prioritise the features desired by our customers. It’ll be good to get the next few releases lined up.

Manchester

I worked from the office on Friday so that I could travel to Manchester in the evening. I felt pretty sick on our journey to Wilmslow where we stayed at an Airbnb. I can’t remember the last time I felt so sick. It was good to have some banter with the guys in the car though.

The Airbnb was a good find, 10 minutes from Manchester Airport and provided the space we needed to crash for the night. A couple of beers and games of pool set us up for an early morning rise to head to the airport and on to Palma.