What I done did in February 2022
I had a good run but I finally got COVID
Started building a Figma plug-in for Reciprocal.dev
After investing some time in building an MVP of a Reciprocal.dev plug-in for Miro the feedback I was getting when I demo’d it to people wasn’t convincing me that it was the right direction.
The feedback made me aware that Miro wasn’t a ‘source of truth’ for teams which made it hard to justify the investment to add the data needed for the plug-in to work.
Based on that feedback I thought about tools that are used as a source of truth within teams and came to the conclusion that doing a similar MVP of a Figma plug-in would be a better means of validating the plug-in based approach for Reciprocal.dev as Figma tends to be a source of truth for the UI and design system for the product.
It was quite fortunate that we made this decision as it looks like Miro has updated their UI to hide more of the ‘bars’ that we were looking to extend to include the entry points of the plug-in.
Building the initial Figma plug-in and comparing the development experience to that of building a Miro plug-in I would say that Figma has a more mature and powerful SDK that will enable us to provide users with a better user experience.
I’m hoping to have an MVP of the plug-in ready for user testing during March with a view of carrying out user testing soon after.
Bought a replacement NAS
In January I bought my first Network Attached Storage (NAS) device which was a QNAP device but after setting it up and looking into the privacy policy of their solution to access the NAS from the internet I found that they were collecting the data being transferred. Safe to say I returned the device.
After doing a bit of shopping and making a decision to give an off-the-shelf NAS solution another try I settled on a Synology NAS. Originally I was looking to get a DS220+ model but it seemed to be impossible to buy, I thought I finally had one but the website cancelled the order after delaying the dispatch of the product multiple times.
Finally I decided to up my budget to a slightly more expensive model that was more readily available and I’ve now had it long enough to say that I prefer Synology’s offering to QNAP’s, not only from a privacy standpoint but also from a UX one as Synology offers a lot more out of the box with QNAP requiring a lot of additional downloads and services to register for in order to use it.
Struggled to buy the next Pokemon Adventures chapters
Getting a hold of the NAS I wanted wasn’t the only issue I was having with trying to buy things online. I’m currently working my way through the Pokemon Adventure manga series and as I was ahead of schedule (reading a ‘chapter’ a month) I needed to buy the next chapter which is the Diamond, Pearl and Platinum (DP&P) one.
Previously I’d been buying box-sets for each chapter as it was cheaper and the jacket around the collection makes it easier to organise the books so I wanted to continue this as there’s a box-set for the DP&P chapter. However because the books are out of print, the cheapest I could find was £135 (3 times the original price) with others going for almost £300.
Facing the fact that I wasn’t likely to find a cheaper price and having already invested in buying the box-sets I decided to pay the ridiculous price but unfotunately much like with the NAS the shop I bought the box-set from listed the product without actually having it in-stock so the order was cancelled after a week.
Finally I accepted the fact that the DP&P chapter would need to be purchased as 11 separate books but again due to them being out of print those books would need to be purchased from a multitude of different suppliers.
At the time of writing I’m still waiting for volumes 4 & 5 turn up but I’m hoping that once I have these that I can spend March reading through the books before I have to track down the next chapters.
Got COVID
After almost two years of managing to avoid catching COVID I decided to take a risk on the 18th to go to leaving drinks for a colleague (the first time seeing anyone outside my household since November 2021) for a couple of hours.
Unfortunately someone in the party had contacted COVID while travelling on the train into Leeds and I spent my time there talking and standing with them so I ended up catching it.
Initially I put the cold-like symptoms down to just catching a cold due to it being the first time I was seeing people (and exposing myself to the random germs they might have), as usually in an office setting there’d be a sniffle going around. However on the 22nd I heard that the other party had tested positive so I did a test myself and it was positive.
I’ve been told that the symptoms are a couple of days that feel like a bad cold followed by a few more days of feeling drained and I’ve now got over the cold like symptoms so I’m just waiting for the waves of tiredness to hit me.
While I’m quite annoyed with the person who gave it to me for coming to the event when they were ill, I’m more annoyed with the UK government as now they’ve dropped the legal requirement to report catching COVID which means that instances like mine are going to happen a lot more frequently.
Framework laptop shipped
When Framework announced they were coming to the UK I put my pre-order in as I needed a new laptop to replace my 2016 Macbook Pro.
Towards the end of the month I got the email to say they were ready to start processing orders and I’m now (at the time of writing) waiting for the laptop to be delivered.
Unfortunately this shipping process hasn’t been great. Framework provided the tracking number but no notion of which service that number was for and then when they did send a place to use that tracking number the website didn’t actually work.
I was able to use a tracking webapp to get some updates on the delivery of the laptop but it’s not been a great customer experience.
