Weeknotes’s is back baby. It’s good again. Awoouu (wolf Howl) source
Happy 2020, everyone!
It’s been about two months since my last blog-post. A lot has happened since then.
The application migration to AWS is now complete.
Last quarter, the Document Checking Service team was working on the final stages of a significant infrastructure change - moving into a Kubernetes cluster running on AWS.
On a cold yet sunny day at the beginning of December we flipped over from our data-centre hosted application to our new deployment in the GSP.
It Just Worked, apart from one issue which we promptly identified and fixed.
This was the culmination of several quarters of work across several teams and programmes and resulted in a switchover that was as close to a non-event as you could get.
We’ve now jumped from 1-2 releases per week to around 10+ releases per day. Small batches, merged regularly, getting fast feedback, reducing risk - I’m going to count that as a win!
I tried NaBloPoMo. It was a disaster.
There are some things where you just have to raise your hands and admit defeat. I tried to write a blog post, no matter how small, every day for the month of November.
I got 14 days in and gave up.
I’m not going to lie - my morale was completely shot after this and I haven’t written anything since. It was the start of a crisis of confidence - am I just a really fucking boring person with nothing interesting to say? Yes Maybe.
If I give it another try this November, I’ll need to “stack the deck” beforehand and have some canned posts ready to go.
I got some nice feedback from my team
The impostor syndrome has been really bad these last few months.
It was nice to receive positive feedback from my team, especially on things that I am consciously doing and being recognised for.
I’ve try really really hard to encourage collaboration and equal voice into our team.
Keeping a tight hand on the tiller is not something that interests me. What I want is to be part of team where everyone feels like they’re being listened to and that works together to achieve their goals.
I like working on a team that moves iteratively towards its goals - identifying and front-loading risks, determining the critical path, thinking about the user needs.
I’m pretty lucky to have landed in a team that’s receptive to these ideas.
I have plans and ideas for the next quarter
Now that we have wrapped up the work to move to the cloud, the team moves its attention in the direction of work necessary support the private-sector passport checking pilot.
The mono-repo that our team works on is private rather than open. This is for historical reasons, but I’m working to establish what needs to happen for us to bring the code into the open (in line with the Service Standard).
I’m collaborating closely with our IA team to identify what’s blocking us and how to remove those blockers.
This is already pushing my outside of my area of expertise and I’m learning more every day.