Forem: Aleksandra Rodionova

Should I write my own lib for a work project?

Aleksandra Rodionova — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 14:23:52 +0000

When it comes to using external libraries, sometimes you can't find exactly what you need, and there comes a question: should I write my own lib? I can outsource it later, it will be helpful, and I'll be valuable to the community. Well, that's not always the case.

Through the years, there were several times we've had to deal with some small libs injected deeply into the project, linked to a GitHub of a developer who left a company long ago. And that was painful.

When you start your little side project, it seems like a good idea to cover all the cases your project needs, but that might be why others will never use it because now it's too specific to what you need. And eventually, most developers move to other projects or companies and stop supporting the tool they've introduced.

Does it mean you should not start a new lib? - Of course not.
Just think of the reasons you do it in the first place.

Do it for pure fun.

We all enjoy coding, and it could be just a side project. Yes, you might have got an idea from the real issue you are facing at work, but don't be in a hurry to import it into a big project right away. (That's precisely the reason everything crushes in the end). So have fun, make it like you don't have a deadline, and you can actually work on a better well-developed solution. Enjoy the run.

Open-source it.

When you have your tool ready and tested, open-source it, write a good annotation and provide clear documentation. Tell your colleagues and friends, collect feedback, and share with the community. And keep collaborating and accept others' ideas, it will help you build smth strong and valuable. Let it grow and prove itself. Let others contribute and make it independent, so even if you lose passion for it, you'll still have the community to maintain it. It's unlikely you'll write a tool completely autonomous from other libs. Even if you are not going to bring new features, there's still a lot of work to keep up with dependencies upgrades to make it stable and useful for future generations.

Collaborate with colleagues

Another approach would be to bring your initiative to your colleagues company-wide and see if anybody else will benefit from realising your idea. If you work in a big company and maintain a couple of projects, you might want to share some code, so creating a lib seems reasonable. But don't get stuck on specifics only you need. If you're going to share functionality between two projects, there's a significant chance your colleagues from other teams have the same issue and want to do the same.

A good example here is a company-wide UI kit. I've been working in Revolut for several years, and in the beginning, our internal, retail and business applications all had different UI. And therefore, all teams worked on their own UI kit with limited functionality, which fit satisfactorily in one domain. But each new app created raised the question, "which UI kit" should I use? And the winner usually was the one with broader functionality and better support. In the end, we have moved to one well-maintained UI kit supported by a dedicated team. Everybody migrated to it, and everybody is interested in bringing new features and keeping top quality.

So share your idea with other teams. It could be a good start for a shared tool everybody would benefit from.

Be professional.

Think of your situation first. If you are in a rush to keep up with deadlines, it's always better to use a well-documented external library. If it does not precisely fit your needs, it might be better to negotiate the requirements instead of inventing the wheel within the night. Consider how it's going to be supported later.

Have fun!

It doesn't always have to be about your job. So don't hesitate to create a new lib for your own enjoyment, and don't store it just on your machine. Share it with the community. And who knows, it could become a useful and valuable tool.

Automate and never have accessibility issues in production ever again.

Aleksandra Rodionova — Mon, 30 May 2022 11:38:22 +0000

In the previous article, we've discussed accessibility and how to place yourself into the minds of those who need extra effort from our side to make their lives easier.

Let's take the next step and see what we can do to make your website better. Sure, you can read Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and fix the issues you find, but are we programmers or not?

Fortunately, we have an impressive variety of accessibility tools we can use. These could be plugins and online services or software applications, open-source or enterprise, so you have an extensive choice. Here are some examples of software available for free:

WAVE

WAVE, developed by WebAim, is a set of tools for assessing web content accessibility for people with disabilities. It visually represents accessibility issues within a web page and explicitly covers accessibility problems with images, headings, labels, and colour contrast. Enter a URL online, install the browser extension, or use the API service.

AChecker

AChecker is an open-source web accessibility checker created to ensure websites are free of accessibility problems. The tool allows users to set their own guidelines to evaluate HTML content by entering a web address, uploading an HTML file, or pasting a complete HTML source code from a web page.

Google's Accessibility Developer Tools

Google Chrome is the most popular browser. And a considerable number of accessibility tools are Chrome plugins. ADT is one powerful example of a Chrome web accessibility checking tool, but there are many more.

Tanaguru

As mentioned in the previous article, many WCAG compliances are driven by laws and government policy. Each country will have its own rules. Tanaguru is one of the tools giving you a perspective not only on WCAG but also on RGAA (the French General Accessibility Reference Framework for Administrations).

Pa11y

Pa11y presents a range of open-source web accessibility tools helping to test and improve accessibility. The Pa11y dashboard can automatically test and monitor web pages for accessibility issues daily and create graphs to help track improvements and regressions over time. You can use UI to interact with Pa11y or integrate it into your code.

These are just a few tools you can use, and you'll find many more free or enterprise solutions with broad functionality available.

What tool to choose?

If you have a budget and dedicated team, you can go all-in with n expensive enterprise solution, but you can start with baby steps. We have selected Pa11y, as it appeared easy to use and integrate into our development processes, involving only one developer from the beginning.

Installing PA11y is straightforward. Just run one command in your node environment:
npm, install -g pa11y.

Out of the box, Pa11y provides everything you need. You can test a local file using pa11y ./path/to/your/file.html. Or run a default audit with one command, pa11y http://example.com. You can compile a .CSV file using the --reporter flag or opt for the in-terminal report to print out to you on-screen.

Pa11y utilises WCAG sources in the reports. You will see a list of the WCAG guideline for each error. Users can check that feedback and read the guideline success criterion within the WCAG standard documentation.

The report can be a little difficult to understand at first, but you'll get used to it. For example, if the error lists this "WCAG2AA.Principle1.Guideline1_1.1_1_1.H37", the guideline error is WCAG 2.0 AA Principle 1, Guideline 1.1, Success Criterion 1.1.1.

It's good to start with, but obviously, you will not run it manually, especially on huge websites. Therefore it's time for tool number two, Pa11y-CI. As the name suggests, Pa11y-CI comes in handy when working with continuous integration. Built with Pa11y, it runs accessibility tests against multiple URLs. You can run it automatically through all your website on every PR, before it gets merged, ensuring that no accessibility errors make it to production.

You can find more details on the Pa11y integration process if you are ready to get to practice. I find this article to be covering pretty much what we need at this step: https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/web-accessibility-testing-via-the-command-line-with-pa11y--cms-34538.

When you first run it, though, you'll probably get a lot of errors, so it might be not a good idea to enable it right away in full power and stuck in a situation where nobody will be able to merge their PRs. So you can mute it with --threshold <number> flag, initially setting the number of errors you have at the moment. Like this, you'll still be able to get reports, but be sure not to increase the amount of errors. And while others are working on their tasks, you would be able to continue fixing all the accessibility issues. With time you'll minify the threshold until you come to zero and never have those accessibility problems tracked by Pa11y in production ever again.

And once you get everything set up, make Pa11y check a mandatory step on every PR prepared to be merged into your code, set the threshold to zero, and you'll see how every change might affect accessibility.

It is worth mentioning that you should not be working on the problem alone. Tell your colleagues about your significant work, and make them involved. Otherwise, you'll get stuck with fixing issues forever while the others continue creating them. So share this article, explain why this process is fundamental and explain what the errors mean and how to think about potential problems before they appear. An excellent place to start educating your colleagues might be the free Udacity course on Web Accessibility: https://www.udacity.com/course/web-accessibility--ud891.

You have everything you need to initiate this helpful routine right now. So make it work. And when everybody starts to care about needs of the others, your product will become much better. And don't stop on one tool. It covers some things, helping you cope with potential complaints, but if you really want to make a change, test your product on real users with disabilities or arrange a third-party assessment to evaluate your website accessibility professionally. Don't wait until you are officially informed. You must have a look at web accessibility.

So if you have not done it yet, start now with simple steps and switch off your trackpad.

Did you know you could be sued if your website is not accessible?

Aleksandra Rodionova — Fri, 27 May 2022 13:53:43 +0000

Many countries in the world have begun to force website owners to comply with the requirements necessary for making the web accessible for everyone. Laws and government policies in many countries already protect the vulnerable population. And major media headlines such as "Supreme Court hands victory to the blind man who sued Domino's oversite accessibility." raise public awareness of legal risk related to the topic. For example, in the United States, website accessibility compliance has primarily been driven by the increase in accessibility lawsuits against corporations.

So if you never thought accessibility is essential, it might come hard on you.

In good old times, when the web was not as Reactive as today and after tables stopped being the only possible way to have a multi-column layout, passionate developers started to care about the tags they were using. There were battles for semantic tag usage for quite a time, and that's when I began to work on my first IT job. So one of the first books I've been recommended to read was on semantics and its importance on accessibility.

I lived with those beliefs in semantics for quite a while, following the community movement to separate meaning from looks. Until one day, React conquered the world, introduced jsx, and suddenly every js developer was so happy they could white all the code again in one file, they've started to forget there were some reasons for using all the different tags, and most of them appeared to become just divs.

Dark times came for accessibility. The importance of semantics was forgotten. Abandoned by developers enjoying their javascript life. Everything became javascript.

So it came as a surprise one day when we've got a requirement to measure the accessibility of our website and make it sufficiently qualitative. We've faced this as a legal requirement from an external regulator, but it gave me another look at a long-forgotten story.

So let's stop for a moment our pace for new cool technologies and answer the question: what is accessibility, and why do we still need all those different tags we can style any way we want? Or even why we need it more than ever now?

Developing a website, we often make a common mistake: we think if it looks good and works fast, it might not matter what's underneath. And while we simply look at the bright button we click, about 15% of the population, which is about 1 billion people, can't see all the beauty of our UI at all or are not able to click on the button. And some are getting anxious about this cool animation we've spent so much time implementing. So if you have a user database, spend some time checking the age of your audience and see which percentage of your potential users might be struggling using your application. The older they are, the bigger this number might be for you.

Nowadays world gives more and more equal opportunities to everyone regardless of gender, race, initial background and all kinds of disabilities. And, of course, the accessible web is a big step toward equality. And if you do not follow the tendency at your own pace, you might find yourself in a problematic legal situation when you'll have to respond to compliances, adapt on the run and empty your bank accounts on the lawsuits.

Hope it's convincing enough that everybody needs accessibility, whether you are a decent human being or a provident entrepreneur.

So, where should we start our journey to the accessible web?

If you've never asked if your website is accessible, it could be overwhelming to start looking into it. So let's begin with small steps. The primary web accessibility standard to comply with is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), known as ISO 40500 or EN 301 549 (European standard). It's published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to establish rules that make the internet accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG use four main principles to assist companies in providing access to the broadest possible range of users and guarantee their experiences are consistent with a vast amount of assistive technologies people can use nowadays and in future:

Understandable: Information and the process of using the interface must be coherent
Perceivable: UI components and information must be shown to users in ways they able to perceive
Robust: Content must be solid enough that it can be analysed reliably by a variety of user agents and various assistive technologies
Operable: UI components and navigation must be functional

These principles might seem complicated to narrow down to coherent guides. Still, there are straightforward tests you can accomplish right away to better understand the audience with disabilities you are targeting. You can conduct these tests on any website to see if it meets basic accessibility requirements, meaning you can get the content smoothly.

Try these now to see why accessibility is important:

Keyboard only approach.

You might have never thought of it, but some users can navigate through the web using only their keyboards. This keyboard accessibility is crucial for users who are blind, low-vision, or have motor control disabilities. And to test it is as easy as you can imagine. You just need to unplug your mouse or turn off your trackpad and try to navigate the website you are viewing.
You should be able to navigate further through the different website components using the TAB button, and with the SHIFT+TAB combination, move backwards. Also, it should be clear which part of the website you interact with through visual indication. Try it at least once. Even better if you make this a full-time experiment and dive into a keyboard-only approach for a whole day or week. Though if you decide to do it, you might want to write down some short-cuts for various applications you are using, which is helpful for everybody and could save you some time in the future.

Screenreaders

While there are numerous platforms helping people with eyesight disabilities, ranging from impaired vision to total blindness, the screen reader is still one of the most common ways to navigate and interact with content on the internet. Some of the most popular screen readers are VoiceOver (Mac & iOS), JAWS (Window), NVDA (Window), Talkback (Android), and ChromeVox (Chromebook)
Voiceover is pre-installed Mac software, so you can try it right now and see how accessible your website or any other applications you daily use would be. You can read more on how to use it in this article: https://webaim.org/articles/voiceover/.

High contrast mode

This is what people use to make content more perceptible to them. Have you ever seen your granny's phone and wondered, "Wow, how can she navigate through these?". Well, this is it.
All you need to do is open your computer settings and change your preference to high contrast mode. Works even better on windows. This usually appears as though your computer has lost its full range of colour capabilities and shows everything in a limited amount of colours. At the same time, all your text and icons (essential sources of information) should stand out from their background. People with low vision and light sensitivity will find it easier to interact with the web page in this mode.

Captions and transcripts

This functionality you probably have benefited from yourself, watching Instagram stories on mute, still reading the captions, though. But for those with hearing disabilities, it's not just a nice feature but a must-have. Otherwise, there would be no way for them to understand the content. So just look at the media on the web page and review if there are subtitles, captions or any sort of text description. You might need to turn them on in the settings.

All those tests are easy and don't require any additional software. So try it all just for a while.

And when you feel compassion for all those who struggle to reach the information they need, make the next step and start using accessibility checking tools to search for issues. Fix them and make sure you'll automatically catch new ones even before they go to production.

How to do this? Read in the next article.

Remote work in IT. Blessing or silent despair?

Aleksandra Rodionova — Thu, 26 May 2022 11:19:39 +0000

More and more employers are switching to fully remote work after the pandemic and abandoning expensive offices. Even those who have never considered hiring remote employees before have found a lot of benefits in this approach, disregarding costly rent and employing skilled developers from all over the world.

For lots of developers working from home came as a blessing as well:

Better life/balance for one
More time on a favourite project for others
Opportunities for travelling
Your favourite set of furniture and devices
More time with family. Developer's paradise! Isn't it?

Numerous companies were afraid that productivity would fall down if developers were not in the office and were allowing limited WFH policy before the pandemic or not permitting it at all. But when the crisis came, everybody was forced to do this. Eventually, it appeared productivity raised up.

So seems like it works for everyone, but is it really so?

Why productivity came up? And how it can affect us in the near future?

First of all, we lost the boundaries between home and work and started to push hard. In an office, it is evident when the day begins and when it ends. While at home, more things are happening throughout the day, and we are trying to catch up in the evening when we usually would have already closed the laptop and left the workspace.

At home, it's tougher to estimate how greatly we perform. We have more time without the necessity to travel to an office. Still, at the same time, we try to calculate at least 8 hours of continuous work, forgetting that breaks for coffee and occasional chats with colleagues also were a part of our everyday routine.

Also, without strict lines between work and home, we might get distracted by some not work-related routines. One glance at the letter lying on a table, and you are already figuring out some bureaucratic issue you have to solve. Seen a broken plate? And here we go on Amazon, choosing a new set on plates. And every time you get back to work, it's not clear how much you have been working today, so you never stop until you need to go to bed. Solving some unexpected issues also does not help. You might have problems with the broadband network, broken equipment, an uncomfortable chair, or suddenly your neighbours just started renovation and drilling building fundament. Somebody used to keep you out of those troubles in the office, and here you have to deal with everything on your own.

Those technicalities eat our time and bring anxiety. We never know when we've finished work, and though it happens to most people, we don't see how others behave in their homes, which makes you even more anxious. You don't know how everyone else is doing, and you think you are the only one having troubles while everyone else is enjoying their new precious work-life balance.

We don't see each other anymore. When we used to come to an office, we met people, talked near a coffee machine, and saw how our colleague's moods changed, either in response to anything happening in a team, in a project, in a company or even in their personal life. And there's a place for support and empathy. If changes are global, people often feel the same uncertainty, but it's almost impossible to get this understanding online.
When live interaction is gone, all we have left with are structured meetings with clear answers to routine questions. So sometimes, when you feel down, you believe you are the only one who feels this way. And then you read those reports about everyone's incredible productivity. As a result, you feel guilty, push harder, productivity rises. You feel worse.

Moreover, you might work with the same people for a year, and they will still be strangers to you. Many of us joined new teams when everybody was already working remotely. We've never had lunch together, never had casual drinks Thursday night. And without those after-work conversations and daily little chats, it's harder to work as a team. It's harder to gain trust if everything you know about your colleague is the way they write you reviews. So sometimes, all the communication you see narrows down to criticism of your work. That might create hostility on an unconscious level. You don't really know that person you have never met, and everything you are getting is what you are doing wrong. Well, it hurts. But can you complain? In most cases, you feel like you can't. Your colleagues just do their job, and hey, if they have so much to say about your code, they are probably just so much better, and your code just sucks. (Rise a hand of you even been here).

We all work differently, and while we are together in the office and stay there the same amount of time, it seems like we are all working equally. When you don't see others physically and only see their PRs or comments in different threads, it might be harder to adequately judge how the routine goes for others. And with positive reports and negative comments, you can judge others better and yourself poorly.

Socialisation was a big part of the office's day-to-day routine. It gathered teams together, brought us friends (which is especially important if you, like me, just moved to a different country before the pandemic), helped us trust our colleagues and company, and felt that you are part of a whole.

And apart from feeling lonely, this lack of communication affects us in various ways. We are talking here not just about human social interaction but just about work-related exchanges. When you see your colleagues face to face, even if you are not a skilled face reader, you will know if something is bothering them, if they are not keeping up with the task, and if there's some technical issue. People sometimes get stuck and keep struggling on their own, though if you just see it and ask, there's a better chance they will tell you the reason, and you can either fix it together or just listen. When you say things out loud, this action on its own sometimes helps you to combine thoughts together and find a decision. But when you communicate only through messenger, you never know when things are getting wrong.

But while some types of communication are lost, you might get too much of the other types.

Family time. Not all family members might feel the same way about spending more time together, and while one of you or both of you were in the office before, you've never faced it earlier, even if you have been living years together. But now, under one roof, you might have different views on how much you both want to work and how much you want to be cuddling watching Netflix. It's good when you have good communication and can talk to each other about everything on your mind, but unfortunately, sometimes you are both in despair and mack each other more and more miserable. And obviously, you love your kids and want to spend more time together, but why do they always run naked in the background while you speak on camera, all suit-up for a crucial meeting?

Another essential routine which was annoying but somehow essential is getting to work, which we don't do anymore. Why that's an issue? Let's see. We love coding. We get sucked by it. We forget to have a meal, we forget to take a walk. At first, it feels like a blessing, oh mine, I don't need to get under this cold rainy weather and can just stay wrapped in my cost fluffy (I mean very manly woollen) blanket and knitted socks granny gave me for Christmas, and we are happy. But do you actually leave your home if you don't have to? There's delivery for everything. And getting to work gave us a reason to walk more than from your bed to the table, if you even have a table. You might just open your eyes and open your laptop, which sleeps next to you, and that's it, your workday started.

And what about lunchtime? Often colleagues called you out, and you used to have lunch together and might have a short walk around the office on your way, sit in the sun in nice weather, try various places with different cuisine.

And after this is all gone, you just put the same cereals in the milk, order the same delivery to waste less time and never leave your computer.

It won't take long for your body to react. The less you move, the less you need to eat, the less you eat, the less energy level you have. And sometime later, you actually start to feel worse when you go out, you are getting tired faster, and you don't like it anymore, you move even less, you eat even less, and this all can get very serious. Both physically and mentally. And the worst thing - you don't even notice this. You are working, busy, and don't feel back pain because you don't really use your back. Or legs. So when we notice that smth went wrong, it might be too late already, and recovery will take a lot of time. Recovery from isolation and recovering your mental health might take even longer.

Depending on your life situation, you can face some of those issues, have all of them in different periods or even all at once.

To sum up:

We are strangers to each other; there is no trust, no bond, and even a sense of hostility sometimes.
People are just their name and a picture in messages, which might create prejudgement. And the opposite, cultural differences are harder to recognise.
The only form of communication is scripted polls and criticism.
You get distracted, can't estimate your work time and spend all day working.
You don't leave home, forget to get meals and get less and less energy, leading to physical and mental issues.
Sometimes you really need a runaway from family.
And on top of all, you always think that everybody is working harder than you.

So what should we do about this?

There are different levels where your actions may have an effect: your personal life, your team and your company if you are in top management.

On the personal level:

Have fixed working hours. And don't communicate after those hours. It doesn't have to be the same 9 to 6 you had in the office, so you still have remote work benefits and can enjoy extra activity during the sunny day. Simply plan as far as you can, a strict schedule if you like it or just a rough plan for a day, but give yourself a timeframe when you work and when you are doing smth else, don't mix it into one never-ending chaos.
You know it, of course, but get a dedicated workplace, where everything is suited for work and not distracting or cosy and soft as you like it. But it should be a special place where you do your job and nothing else. Preferably in a separate room from your loved ones.
And have a backup place. Good if you still have an optional office to go to, but if you don't, find one favourite cafe with good wifi or a friendly co-working space nearby. Do it in advance, so you know where to go if suddenly all the neighbours decide to sing their favourite karaoke on high volume.
Go for a walk. Every day. During the first lockdown, the best thing that happened to me was a shitty internet provider, cutting my connection every day at 1pm for 3 hours. So I just had to walk. And I suddenly noticed it gets better. And all this noisy bubble around my head disappears. And if I repeat it every day or just don't comes back. Walking might feel like a waste of time, but it does help, and you can listen to audiobooks while doing this or talking to friends.
Meet other people. Even if you think your spouse is the best person in the world. Get out and bring some fresh thoughts back to the family. If you live alone and hate people, still go meet them. It might feel good.
Do some sports, go out for good quality food, it's a good start to keep yourself healthy and meet new people outside of work.
Get psychotherapy if you think you might need it. That's ok, everybody needs it at some time in life.
Don't judge yourself, don't compare yourself with others, and do your work. Sometimes we think we must work at least 8 hours a day and believe that working means actual code writing, and when there's no end to a workday, we just continue working. But in real life, communication takes a lot of time, and for higher positions, you might spend 0 hours during the day writing code. That's ok. It does not mean you were not working.

At the team level:

Have working hours. Again. And don't communicate after those hours. Especially don't start the conversation. Sometimes you think it's easier just to write what's on your mind in the middle of the night and be done with it but think of your colleague who might be thinking he is obligated to answer right now. And write it in your notes and send it in the morning.
Have team buildings. Whenever it's virtual or offline, find some time, make it regular, get to know your colleagues more than just commenters on your reviews, know them as people and you might actually like them and start to trust them.
Use cameras more often. Don't hide behind the avatar.
Write something nice in reviews as well, and appreciate the work of the others.
Ask your teammates occasionally what is happening in their work and life (works better if you've met personally but will work anyway). Sometimes people are overwhelmed but don't think their thoughts are valuable. It's nice to share how your vacation went, and again, you can find smth in common, and your team might become a pleasant environment, not just pictures with names.

On a company level

Care about employees. Not just say it to create a better picture in mass media, but treat people like a valuable part of a whole, not just replaceable numbers. The example you give on a top-level is the starting point for company culture.
Sign a contract with a psychological service. You might hire a psychologist as an alternative, but people might feel safer if they speak about their problems with someone outside of the workplace.
If you don't have resources for professional help, some of your employees might be interested in volunteering and speaking with those who don't feel they can openly talk to a teammate. Just make sure this is anonymous and doesn't spread outside of a safe space.
Have regular company-wide meetings. Share what's going on globally in a company. Make occasional demos and show people their work is appreciated. And have Q&A sessions with stakeholders.

We can do plenty of things to make everyday work life better. So speak up and bring some of them to reality. And if you feel down, remember - you are not alone.