超賢 Chao Xian : I BATMAN

Weeknotes 1

(3 minutes reading time)

This past week has been a bit up and down.

Monday was very busy with meetings:

  • X-GOV.UK standup
  • Catch up with my DM Andy M on what’s next
  • My 1-1 with my line manager
  • 1-1s with line reports
  • Plan for minor Cookies tweak
  • Incident review

The were a couple of interesting things from that day for me.

The first was my line report 1-1s. I love being a line manager (so far!) and feel a great sense of pride in supporting and encouraging one of them in particular who has done immensely well in the past year. I’ve also recently taken on a second line report who is brand new to GOV.UK and GDS. They are on an intense project, and I was worrying about them a bit. But after some probing they’re actually fine and it’s just me. Still, better to make sure than to not.

The other was an incident review where a mistake was made during some work where no process had been previously established. I was the one who pressed the room to ensure that there was documentation (Me! The meek one!) to help avoid it happening again in future. I hope I did it in an assertive way that was acceptable. Later my line manager fed back that he’d noticed I’d become more forward in ensuring the right things get done.

Tuesday was a bit more chill, where I got to do a tiny bit of spiking on the cookies work.

Wednesday I very nearly missed my Programme Check-In and also ended up knocking on the door of the wrong meeting room (where the Brexit Teams were with the Head of GOV.UK!) as I’d not got the notification for the last minute location switch. Got there in the end and had a good update with the Head of Tech for GOV.UK and spoke about team happiness.

On that last subject, I find myself in an odd situation where we’re in an immense swirl of uncertainty but I seem to be ok with it at the moment. I also know that my team are one of the most stable and given the most consistency in our work.

Thursday and Friday was a bit of a pain. I spent a lot of time trying to work out how to do a release of a gem to Rubygems from an older version as the latest was broken. I needed to do this to unblock the upcoming tweak to our Cookies form. By the time I’d left we’d been able to work out how to yank the broken versions from Rubygems.org, which helped to unblock the issue but only partially. We also had a failure on CI where it was using Sprockets 4 (we don’t know why it ended up on that version) but our applications expects Sprockets 3. Luckily I’ve just checked, and Alex J has managed to pin all of the dependencies to the correct combination for the tests to pass.

Meanwhile I was also struggling to rework the Jasmine tests to not be broken after the Cookies form tweak, even though I could see that the feature was working ok in the app itself. I feel really bad having to hand it over to my team to handle as I’m away next week for half term.

But a week with my girls and a visit to Comic Con will definitely result in a non-work related Weeknote next! 🦇