Weeknotes 13 and 14
(2 minutes reading time)
Week 13
The week was mostly spent catching up with things and battling with doing a Rails upgrade on Whitehall which I realised wasn’t really a productive use of my time in terms of priorities. This was work to get it from Rails 5.1 to version 5.2. But we have plans to get all of our apps onto Rails 6 soon. I also discovered that our use of a legacy sass compiler blocks our upgrades to Rails 6 (I, apparently, mistakenly thought at the time).
We also had an incident review to cover something pretty major. The thing that I was most interested in seeing is improvements in how we absorb our processes. I think we rely too much on having read the docs and being familiar with it, when the reality is practise is what’s really needed to absorb it. There was talk of Game Days where we drill through an incident. I’d love to see this happen soon for GOV.UK as I noted I’m considered an “old hand” at on call duty by virtue of the fact I’ve been on the roto for a while, but I’ve not actually dealt with more than 2 incidences out of hours. Also the docs haven’t really been battle tested enough. Having the space to follow through the docs during a simulated situation is a far less risky time to realilse that the docs are bad! Our Head of Tech on GOV.UK has things in the pipeline for this to happen.
It was also a short week for me as I jumped on the train on Friday 10th to Paris 🇫🇷 ! My first holiday in a long time (2 years!) and it was the break (and companionship) I really needed.
Week 14
This week has been up and down for me. I had a good chat with our Lead PM about our future. He seemed happy with what I had mapped out. And also liked my Unofficial Roadmap slides for the #a11y team. I managed to raise a PR on Smart Answers and ship it in a relatively short amount of time. I was at a lot of meetings. I even got asked along to one with the team who are “working on mobile”, but I’m not sure how useful I am to them yet.
One meeting turned out to not be so useful, in which I was told my assumptions that our current sass compiler legacy doesn’t actually block Rails 6 upgrades. I need to do more investigation into this.
But I did attend a very interesting post-workshop analysis meeting on challening behaviour at work, organised by the peerless Liz Lutgendorf. I was interviewed alongside my team in a Service Mapping session and it made me realise how good our team is not just as a “maintenance” team but that we carry out a lot of coordination work (mainly me!).