Weeknotes 3
(2 minutes reading time)
This is late because I lost momentum. But then I was told to JFDI. So here: Last week had felt really uneventful for me. Definitely so work wise.
Monday I went along to an Incident Review where Bevan and I were called in the middle of the night a few weeks ago when Travel Alert emails were stuck. This was rolled in together with another incident more recently with the same issue. We seem to be dealing with a huge, huge number of emails being sent out nowadays but also dealing with a bottleneck somewhere. Details to come if we can manage to fix it.
Tuesday I was covering 2ndline. I spent most of the day investigating a weird situation with redirects with draft versions. In the end we decided to publish to a new slug instead, which solved the problem entirely. That was a colossal frustration for me.
Wednesday was a better day overall. Got the sprint planning session done. It felt well planned at the time. I also did a Programme Check-In with my DM. That was mainly to let them know we’re a bit behind with fewer people around recently. It was more to keep them in the loop on our slowed progress rather than flag any major concern. I also managed to get licence-finder tests passing under govuk-docker, thanks to the creator of that project Ben T.
Thursday is a blank for me at the moment. I know I went to therapy in the afternoon as I usually do.
Friday I decided to work from home. I’d not been in my flat much this week. I normally wfh every other Friday anyway and take the afternoon off to get my girls who then come stay with me for the weekend. So the weeks when I don’t have them I try to go into the office every day. But I really needed the day out of the office.
I’d spent quite a few (sporadic) days trying to dockerise the licence-finder app. I usually find working in the office far, far, too distracting for heads down kind of work. It’s not a conducive environment for it. I get easily distracted, and the number of people around in an open office is hellish for my focus. Even with my (weak) noise cancelling headphones on. The day spent at home was really productive and I managed to raise a PR.
In between meetings is when I get a chance to do some coding, usually something on the sidelines so that I’m not holding anything up, or something I can work on ahead of when the team will need it. And as the only backend specialist, it’s down to me to provide. The problem is as a Tech Lead, my devs rely on me being around, and I feel guilty when I’m not on the off chance they need me to sit with them to help out on something. Even worse if that has actually been the case.
I also try my best to give them as many tools as possible to help themselves (teach a person to fish). I guess Fridays is the right time to be a little bit selfish when most people wfh anyway.