Notes from April

Receiving my apprenticeship result 👩‍🎓 Building a new website for campaign group Swarm 🐝 Adding new features to The World Transformed site 🏭 Support work for membership organization The Left Book Club 📕

What I’ve been working on

I received my apprenticeship final grade in April and I’m very proud to say that I passed with a Merit. I’ve signed a further contract with my apprenticeship employer Common Knowledge so I’m now a Junior Engineer and looking forward to learning more with them over the next year. Aside from that, I’ve been adding features to The World Transformed site in preparation for this year’s festival and doing some bug fixes for The Left Book Club - specifically to do with their Shopify integration.

What I’ve been learning

This month I’ve been learning how to:

• Add a .nvmrc file to repositories to specify which Node version should be used with a project
• Use the linearGradient element to recreate a Photoshop gradient map with an SVG
• Use the Wagtail Menus package to create different editable menus and custom menu templates for a site
• Set up an SSH connection to a WordPress installation hosted on Kinsta and use git to clone a repo into it
• Set up a Cron Job to run the Django command publish_scheduled_pages every half hour

What’s next

In May I’ll be finishing the SWARM website build. I will also be working on the new site for indigenous communications network Awasqa. I’m assisting a colleague with a WordPress site for The Architecture Lobby and I will likely be doing some additional devops support work for 350.org. I want to dedicate some personal time to creating a new personal site with a portfolio and migrating this blog. I haven’t decided yet which language or framework to use but I’m considering something like React and Sanity.io.

Interesting links

These are some interesting links that I’ve come across this month:

• Trigger GitHub Actions and view status and logs directly from the editor with this VSCode extension
• A collection of JavaScript interview questions and answers that are helpful for preparing for job interviews
• This Smashing Magazine article explains how the :has() selector could soon become a game-changer
• A comprehensive collection of techniques developers can use to optimize their web apps from Stripe engineer Joe Liccini
• The NerdOut@Spotify podcast produced by the Spotify engineering team gives an insider look into their work