Writing code you pray is never used, or: COVID, Coping & Coding
Forward — Gabriel (Senior Frontend Developer / Designer)
This week I was asked to curate our company’s tech Twitter account. I’m not a particularly serious guy, most of us here aren’t — we all seem to have some odd quirks — so whilst I’ve been posting silly tips on coping with Lockdown on Twitter, I thought I’d reach out to other’s on the Frontend team, get their coping strategies and an overview of unexpected COVID tasks, which now that they’re live, we hope will never need to be turned on.
You can follow my daftness here if you are bored, don’t worry the quality of tweets will be up soon when my shift is over. https://twitter.com/CodeandWild
Corona Coping — Michael (Frontend Developer)
“It has been nice not being on a train for 3 hours everyday. I have felt like I have been able to get more out of every day in both work and social life — Being able to spend time with my family, talk to my friends and getting in a workout every evening. Trying to improve myself and use the time for the better.
Something I really do miss is general chat with people outside the team, some people I haven’t really talked to in weeks. There’s only so many video calls I do.”
Love this perspective of self improvement… I should take a leaf out of Michael’s book
Corona Coping — Tom (Senior Frontend Developer)
“I’m lucky to spend time with my 5 month old, the downside of that is more distractions and nappy changes, which don’t schedule themselves around meetings.
Find it too quiet — even with music. Missing the general chit-chat around the office, especially with those who I rarely work with day-to-day. My idea to solve this is to call someone from my team for at least 30 minutes, while out on my daily exercise.”
I’m envious of Tom’s life in a lot of ways, his beautiful baby has graced many video calls, and his similarly beautiful but much more hairy dog has been known to drop in too.
Corona Coping — Gabe (Senior Frontend Developer / Designer)
Counting the ways I’m fortunate and carving out time to focus, is keeping me going right now. It has been hardest when others in my team were too busy to chat through ideas, and inspiration dwindled, but switching to tasks I can tackle on my own has given me more drive.
To help make each day feel different I’ve been focusing on cooking different dishes, often using my sous vide to spoil my girlfriend* with delicious meals. This gives me a bit of a ‘project’ to work on, as some things take 24 hours (or longer!) to cook. And one of those meals I did recently culminated in me proposing to my girlfriend, so that was nice!
* Now fiancee! How’s that for coping techniques!?
Code we pray is never used — Syed Kazmi (Frontend Developer)
If you didn’t know we sell flowers and we post them through your letterbox, yay! A few months ago back no one could have imagined being locked away, working from home all the time but when the time came we adapted to the situation.
This also meant as a business we had to adapt to to give customers the best experience at the worst time.
We as a team decided concentrate on 2 main areas:
- Full Closure (i.e warehouses, delivery services etc)
- Partial Closure (i.e certain postcodes become undeliverable)
Each of the above sections had its own specific features. Below is list of those features:
Site wide messaging tool:
Keeping our customers informed about how we’re dealing with COVID and what they can expect from us, quickly and throughout the site. Our solution was a new layer on top of our existing service bar, found at the top of most pages, which overrode existing logic to display universally, including the ability to customise this logic in real-time without deployment.
A full closure homepage:
In the unlikely event of a shutdown we would need to quickly deploy a new homepage with essential information. We knew this could happen in a moment’s notice with no time for a code release.
We used our Contentful integration to prepare a new homepage variation which could be toggled instantly by any frontend developer (There’s 7 of us now, and we are always on the lookout for passionate Angular developers!)
A pop-up modal:
During a shutdown we still wanted the option to maintain the ability to browse our gifts, but with pertinent information displayed in a modal, this modal should keep customers informed about delivery availability. The challenge here was how to handle cross country shipping scenarios (i.e a user sending flowers from the UK site to someone in france).
Our solution was to check each shipping country’s “COVID status” and use this logic to trigger the modal. Again this allowed us to make changes, when needed, with no code release.
Postcode checker:
In the event of a partial shutdown some postcodes could become undeliverable due to government or courier rules, we need to keep customers informed at the earliest stage possible in their journey to avoid disappointment. We worked closely with our amazing backend team to update our API and extend error messaging options to handle this scenario.
In summary:
These are some of the main things we did to help our customers during this crazy time. In a time like this when all are away from our loved ones, receiving or sending a gift of lovely flowers can brighten up someone’s day and make this situation a little easier to get through. And that’s the main reason behind all this work we did as a team to give our customers a way to send joy to someone else.
All of this was very last minute and since we’re all working from home it made the communication a little harder since we couldn’t just walk over to someone’s desk and clarify something. To combat that we created what I like to call “The Covid Squad” , this included members from all communities: backend, apps, frontend, testers, product managers and engineering managers/scrum masters. Kinda like when Gandlaf created the “Fellowship of the Ring” or when Nick Fury assembled the Avengers (I got dibs on being Iron man!). Our squad met every morning to discuss or progress and talk about any blockers.
As developers we want our code to be released, doing its job for each of our customers, but this time I hope our work never sees the light of day.
Peace x
