Monthnote - weeknotes 10 to 12
(2 minutes reading time)
The end of December 2019 was a bit of a chaotic rush to get cookies work done before the Christmas break. This work came suddenly, and I had anticipated a relatively quiet period before Christmas so had allowed some of my schedule to sit on interview panels. This meant my presence with the team while they worked hard on the cookies changes was sporadic. I did not feel I was there enough to be supportive to them.
But they were really great and got a solution in place. All we had to do was deploy. But deploying a change like this to every page on GOV.UK takes a lot of time as it rolls out to across our 13 frontend rendering apps. Going across our deployment pipeline isn’t too bad. It’s the added bottleneck of some of the larger, slower running tests (cough e2e cough) that makes the day a little bit arduous.
A moving target of deadlines pushed us to the day before my team of devs were set to take their well deserved and rightful annual leave. Luckily one of the other GOV.UK senior frontend devs had already volunteered their time, and I asked another excellent FE dev to help out - one who I’d worked with before on the original cookies consent implementation. They swooped in on the last couple of days to follow what I had outlined as steps to deploy the changes. It all went pretty smoothly as I checked in once I had to take my own annual leave - I had booked the day off to see Star Wars in the early morning, and then the afternoon was spent at my last therapy session for the year.
I am so grateful to my team and other devs from GOV.UK. They are all a super bunch and the work came together pretty well. An additional member swooped in to fix an issue with GA after we’d released our changes. A problem that 2 of our other devs had already spent a day trying to figure out. I love how we all pitch in and help each other. I feel pretty rubbish for my insignificant contribution to this stint of work.
Since then I’ve had a really wonderful Christmas and New Year break.
Now I’m back to work proper, having had a couple days of dipping my toe with wfh and a quiet day in the office over the break. It’s good to be back onto our a11y work proper again. It’ll be good to have a clear run on this and meet out milestones.
2020 - Onward.