Notes from November

🌍 Working on FutureNatures, StopWatch, and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap for Common Knowledge ✏️ Redesigning my personal website in WordPress 🗣 Practicing mock assessments for my apprenticeship portfolio review.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

What I’ve been working on

This month has been full of a few different projects.

• I’ve started to build a new personal website in WordPress
• I picked up some supporting work for the FutureNatures website debugging some issues with a search and filter plugin
• Added the option for embedding Shiny apps into pages on the StopWatch site
• Common Knowledge is also working on a big redesign of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap website, and I’ve been helping there with some UI components like a carousel slide and a newsletter sign up
• With our Project Manager I’ve been planning and scoping the new Common Knowledge website - details below
• I took part in mock interviews with Founders and Coders to prepare for my assessed portfolio review in the near future

What I’ve been learning

Over the past month I’ve learnt how to:

• use Flowbite to build UI components with Tailwind CSS in Django templates
• use meta_query inside WP_Query to order and filter by custom meta fields
• use the Stimulus Carousel package (built on top of Swiper.js) to create a responsive carousel component. One really cool thing about this is the customisable SwiperOptions. In this case, I used them to determine the number of slides displayed based on screen size
• create a custom EmbedFinder class in a Django application

What’s next

In December I’ll be working exclusively on my final project which will be a redesign and rebuild of the Common Knowledge website. This project and its documentation will form the second half of my grade for my apprenticeship. I’ll be the primary developer on this project which involves migrating the current Gatsby site with content in Markdown to the Django Wagtail CMS. I’ll be aiming to make a maintainable, performant and accessible website that will serve the business needs of Common Knowledge.

Interesting links

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

• Figma Tailwind CSS - this plugin converts a Figma design directly into a Tailwind theme.js file for use in your projects
• Storybook for Django - this is a UI development environment for Django components. Create and test UI components in isolation from your Django views.
• A List Apart - a design magazine on all aspects of web design with a special focus on web standards and best practices
• Hemmingway App - this app identifies lengthy, complex sentences and other mistakes to make your writing clearer.