Dev-time is our Thursday evening ritual, whoever from the team can make it, usually three of us, sometimes fewer. This week was a proper quiet one, less "here's a feature," more "here's what I've been messing about with." Still worth sharing.
The marketing site just got a Lighthouse glow-up
Quick one first: the accessibility and performance work on this site went live right before we sat down. Colour contrast across buttons, muted text and the goldenrod accent now all meet WCAG AA (4.5:1), nav toggles have proper ARIA labels, and a batch of oversized images (including 86 "trusted by" logos) got compressed and converted to WebP.
Lighthouse CI now runs on every push too, so accessibility and SEO regressions fail the build instead of quietly slipping through. Net result: accessibility scores jumped from the low 80s to 95-96 across the key pages, and the blog listing's performance score went from 82 to 90 off the back of one hero image fix alone.
Small, unglamorous, exactly the kind of thing that's easy to keep putting off. Glad it's done.
An idea that didn't work (but was worth trying)
I'd been sat on an idea since a swim the previous Monday: what if a PETALS score wasn't just colour-coded from red to green, but the size of the shape changed too, better score, bigger flower.
I mocked it up, played with a couple of variants including an animated version, and, well, it doesn't really work. The number on the flower still needs to be readable at every size, so a low score just ends up as a tiny illegible blob. Briefly tempted to go 3D and "make it really wow, in your face," then got bored, which is probably the right instinct.
Not every idea makes the cut, but it's the kind of thing worth throwing around out loud rather than sitting on.
What everyone's been building on the side
The rest of the session turned into a bit of a show and tell for personal projects, and there's a proper theme running through them: agents quietly doing the boring bits so people can focus on the interesting bit.
- Turning personal OKR tracking into a habit-card system, then pointing Claude at a pile of notes and asking it to pull out anything that sounds like an action, straight onto a to-do list.
- A Bluetooth treadmill controller that takes plain English ("5 minutes at this speed, 10 minutes at that incline"), turns it into JSON, drives the treadmill, and logs everything back to Apple Health.
- Setting Codex loose overnight with computer use, and waking up to an email from Apple saying the app was ready on TestFlight. Unattended, start to finish.
- A watch app called Just Pace that changes colour and gives haptic feedback depending on whether you're ahead or behind pace, with audio feedback via AirPods next on the list.
- An old Nike+ idea revisited: generative "soundtrack to life" music that shifts based on what's actually around you (a lake, a busy road, open countryside) pulled from OpenStreetMap, rather than a fixed playlist.
- Nib, a voice-note app for capturing a thought mid-swim or mid-drive that gets synced and interpreted automatically, no fumbling for a phone required.
- A neat Shortcuts trick built around What's Overhead: share a Google Maps pin, it grabs the lat/long and drops a geofenced Reminder, handy for "get off here" on a train in a country where you don't speak the language.
And a proper throwback: the BBC R&D team once built something called CAKE, a cook-along video where ingredient quantities and timers lived as HTML overlays on top of the video itself, scaling automatically to however many people you were cooking for. There's a genuine itch to vibe-code a modern version of that.
None of this is PETALS roadmap, and that's rather the point, a healthy side-project habit across the team is a good sign in itself. More on the ones that stick around soon.