PETALS Snapshot 1

This is the first episode of the new series of my regular content, which I'm going to be calling Petals Snapshots. So what is Petals, I hear you ask? It's a simple but quite powerful framework that I've been developing over the past 18 months or so for regular reflection and action, and it now being used with tech teams that I work with for continuous improvement. The concept is very simple. You rate your previous time period, week, month, fortnight, whatever out of five to get some scores about how you are feeling about your previous iteration. There are five main areas that we focus on productivity, enjoyment, teamwork learning, and serenity, previously known as stress. Out of that, you score them out of five and then you get some averages for the overall score. But as you work with it in team, you can start comparing other averages across the five dimensions to get some ideas of how the whole team are feeling. Now, going back to my roots, I thought I'd use the Petals framework for my own reflection and share it in the public for others to learn from. Hopefully it's going to give you some insights as to how I work. The sort of stuff I do on my side projects, petals being the main one right now, and on a meta level, it makes sense to use that framework to start communicating how things can work. So it's important to not focus on the numbers too much, but actually think about the why to those scores, think about the highlights, the challenges, the lessons learned, and ideally, the actions to improve on the next iteration. This is how I've been doing it over time in the past, and this is something that I've been demonstrating with some of the engineering tech teams I've been focused on as well. Every episode will be about ten or 15 minutes long, not too much longer than that. I think it gets too carried away, but it gives me enough opportunity to dive into the details of the stuff I talk about, get some key takeaways from this as well. And I want to make sure that the audience actually gets something from this content, not just from a selfish perspective. In the interest of consistency, I'm also going to be doing this on a two weekly cycle similarly aligned to how most of our software engineering teams do their two week sprints or cycles. I did consider weekly, but that felt too quick, too snappy, and not enough time. So I should get some substantial evidence out of each time frame. Monthly was too slow for my liking, it just takes too long and I'll probably forget some of the stuff I'd done previously too. Weekly unfortunately feels like the bright sweet spot at the moment, but in interest of iteration and improvements, that will probably change over time, let's see how things go there. So with all that in mind, I'm going to crack on with the first episode of these petals snapshots. So for this iteration, the first one, I'm going to be doing the following scores productivity four, enjoyment four, teamwork three, learning three and Serenity three. Overall average about 3.4. So I wanted to go back rewind now and talk about why, as I say, productivity has been pretty good. This last week or so. I had to get quite focused to get the website ready and I've been really getting down to the details. So this week I soft launched or did a beta invite to the website to a close community on the side. I've got a good network of friends, colleagues and peers that I respect in their Chrome engineering perspective, from a designing perspective, business a good mix and it was a great opportunity to get some real tangible feedback from people I trust to give me real world feedback. Not just great, that looks awesome. The end. They were really kind of going into the detail to look even looking down to the way that the fonts are placed on the website and that's been the main focus for me this week. Actually, generally speaking, the website has come across quite well. They've got the content and the format is all good, but there are some questions around the types of fonts I've been put into the website. The main part was the main body font. So the headings I've set in this font called Gagu, it's a Google font that's available, it's very handwritten. I want to go back to the kind of core essence of at alls of being very simple team people focused. But equally when all the body content was placed was set in that type face, it was very hard to follow. So I had to rethink that. We tried using like a basic San Serif font like Ariel or Helvetica, but that didn't quite place sit right either. So I've now tried a more modest based kind of techie typeface instead. That feels much better now, but we have had to go through the process of let's try something, see what the feedback is like. What I found really useful this week though is the Netlify deploy preview branches. So the way the website is set up, it's all version controlled in GitHub. We've got a dedicated organization now with a dedicated repo for the website that has been hooked up with Netlify. It's got all continuous deployments configured so every commit to main will be deployed out to the main website. But what you can also do is set up these deployed previews. So if I create a new branch with a new idea, it will automatically ship that to a dedicated environment and I can send that link around to people to get some feedback. And that's how I've been testing the water with all the new fonts ideas around that. As I say, great piece of kit that I've been using. I really recommend Netlify for any sort of build like this under the hood just as an FYI. It's using NextJS as a foundation, it's got Tailwind CSS in there for the visuals and obviously we're using Git and Netlify for the continuous deployment process. And as I mentioned at the start, we're also using Google fonts for the types of faces that are used and I also found a nice template and some illustrations that complemented the designs I wanted to go for. Also need to give a hat tip out to Sam Hardacre for creating the lovely little logo that you'll see on the website. So it's been a productive week basically. I've really got to get things done. I knew what was a priority, I was getting some direct feedback from the community around what needs to be worked on. The themes were obviously addressing the fonts more than anything, but there were some nice little tricks and wins as well around the course to actions and some of the wordings that are in place. It's in a good place now. I did want to release the website this week, but I'm glad I didn't push it too hard because obviously there was a few little areas that needed addressing before it goes into the public domain. So I've really enjoyed doing this work this week. It's had a few moments of stress, which is why Serenity scores come down a little bit, but the fact I've managed to get something built and actually address some of the feedback I was getting from my community was really useful and understand and helpful for me. Teamwork again was relatively high because I was getting all direct feedback from people that I want to work closely with, people I trusted and I highly regard for what they know and their feedback they were giving me. And also learning was quite a nice. I learned a few tricks around Netlify. For example, I understood some of the details on how fonts are placed with Tailwind CSS as well. Another little thing I learned about NextJS was how to add Google Analytics with a new Google Analytics. Four mechanisms that are available and actually go into the detail around how scripts are placed in the HTML page using some of the new components in there and the ordering of events for that, but I actually managed to build and deploy that within about an hour. Nice little learn exercise, did a few little checks around Google on the best way to do this with NextJS and got that in place straight away. So then a nice score for learning as well this week. So with it being ready for launch, I feel like I'm in a good place. Productivity has been strong, all the other scores are pretty good, but I think with a 3.4 for the overall sprint. I don't often call these things iterations, it's a nice middle central point, slightly above average, and hopefully I can improve those things going forward. If any of this information is quite useful to you. Do reach out and let me know if you want to know more. Quite happy to share the lessons learned behind the scenes and if you want to get involved or learn more about Petals as a whole. The website is about to go live this week. This is available at Petals team, one of those funky new domains, and I really appreciate any feedback from people that visit the website. Want to know a bit more about it, want to start using this concept. I'm there for any advice and consultation that wants help on this stuff. This content is being syndicated on YouTube and all the podcast apps. I'm going to continue using the site cast feed, so you're not going to lose and change and all that sort of stuff. There may be a spin off at some point in the future, but for now I'm going to keep it all under the same hood. It's easy to manage. I don't need to worry about creating new areas for this stuff, but I'll probably tag it in a way so you can find Petals content amongst all the other stuff that I do along the side. But it has been fantastic to work with this project and I hope to encourage others who want to make side projects a reality to do it. Just get on with it and hold yourself accountable by creating this sort of content, putting it out there and getting some feedback from your peers and networks. That's it all for this time. I'm going to wrap up there, get in touch. You can email me [email protected]. You can hit me on Mastodon managingengineer. Net at psy and you can follow and subscribe to all the social channels that are out there. I'll be back in two weeks time with the next iteration of the Petals Spotlights. Thank you for watching and listening.