Internal day: June 2020

It is no doubt that we are still living in uncertainty, and the future is far from clear, however as a company we have managed to win a couple of new & exciting projects in the last few weeks!

This means that we’re entering into a busy period for the next couple of months and as a result June internal day was a little different. While some of the team still focused on improving processes to make sure the next few months are as efficient as they can be, other team members focused on tying up loose ends on client projects ahead of July and August. This also means that we have taken the decision to pause internal days in July and August to free up a little time. But no worries, we will be back in September with for more internal training days! 

In the meantime, here is what happened as the team looked to focus on making improvements to ensure that their time and resources are maximised in the next couple of months. 

Morning 

A key goal set by our Founder, Alex Price for the year 2020 was to enable the wider ClarityDX team to grow their understanding of what commercial success is for ClarityDX and to more broadly gain a better understanding of the company finances. In order to reach this goal, the day started for the whole team with a presentation by Alex, on company finances. This has acted as a first step towards educating the team on the company finances and enabling a more in depth understanding of the way ClarityDX operates. 

While some team members chose to focus on client projects today, others worked on harnessing their skills further, here’s how the day unfolded:

Developers

Ahmad continued his work from the previous internal days on a Custom Bookmark Functionality which will eventually allow users to bookmark posts and display them in a dashboard. It’s good practice to keep functionality that is not needed all the time separate from the core theme files, so it can be used as a plugin wherever required. Furthermore, this will allow the plugin to be used in the future separately from the theme, and further development can be done as updates. You can read more about the importance of quality plugins here. Ahmad also spent some time reading and learning more about creating plugins. 

For Jafar, the goal for the day was to work on improving his PHP web development skills by building a navigation menu using vanilla javascript and PHP. Mega menus have come up in some of the designs used in our past projects, so Jafar focused on improving his understanding of PHP and WordPress nav walker in particular. This practice will enable him build out menus faster on projects which will cut down on development time for clients. It also means Jafar will be able to provide help to other developers if they are having problems building menus.

Project Managers 

While Roz was enjoying her time-off, and Graham was focused on working with the team, our Project Manager Ellie focused on synching together our current testing software (BrowserStack) and our project management software (Teamwork). At the moment there is some disconnect between the two, which means the internal process can sometimes take a little longer – hence Ellie spent the day researching as to whether there is an alternative we could use that would better sync the processes together, overall helping to make the QA process more efficient. 

Designers 

The Designers, alongside our Account Director James worked on preparing a content workshop for a client that works for the team internally, is catered towards the clients, and overall is better suited to the WFH environment. If the template outlined today works well, it’s something that the team will be able to reuse on future client work & improve client experience even further.

Afternoon 

Developers 

Ahmad got the functionality working with a proof of concept and more broadly learning more about plugin development. Next step? Creating the functionality as a plugin.

The day was a success for Jafar, as by the afternoon he built a mega menu using vanilla Javascript and PHP! Here’s how it’s looking:

Project Managers

By the end of the day, Ellie has started testing a new cross browser testing tool called Lambda, which she will continue to trial over the next couple weeks.

Designers 

The Designers and Account Director James spent the day working out the software called Miro and discussing the process that will take place for future content workshops with a client – watch this space for more detail on this!