Week note 0 #
In the grand tradition of many others I'm going to try to hold myself to updating weekly. I'm not sure how much work related content I can provide as a lot of my work is confidential at one level or another, sometimes due to the nature of the forward looking work that hasn't actually been communicated to colleagues let alone beyond, and sometimes due to it involving people. People matters always come with a level of privacy concern linked to them, so it becomes tricky.
Work #
Some things of note this week:
- we had a mini incident during the week whereby some config brought down the site for about 10 minutes. However all the things we put in place to avoid such things being disasterous kicked in, so it was largely invisible to users unless they were trying to use the site search. We squeezed in the incident review at the end of the week it happened in instead of the following Monday due to leave. One of the best things about working on GOV.UK is that the no-blame culture is very real. People aren't scared to say "oh no, I broke it!" and get all hands on deck to figure out what's gone wrong and sort it out. It means that people will be open about their mistakes, and everyone learns from them, and we take away real actions that will help to prevent future incidents. Reviews of such things have a lot of potential to make people feel bad but our positive culture meant it was actually a really nice positive way to go into the weekend.
- I had a few meetings doing a forward look for recruitment needs. We've been through a lot of recruitment freezes and people alignment over the last couple of years but we're finally able to start thinking about which teams could use being bolstered a little, which will be a really positive move, especially since at the moment one stint of unexpected leave has teams considering putting things about capacity onto the risk register.
- One of the teams I work with has completed a discovery piece of work over the past month and a half. It's solidified some thinking, and raised some extra points, giving us a clearer plan for what to do next. It's been quite a satisfying phase of the project and our user researcher in particular has done some sterling work getting departments involved with what we'll be building from the centre.
- Another project that seems to have been running way longer than it should have, is about to go live imminently as well. This piece is one of those where you spend ages waiting for a stakeholder to give input, then they want to iterate multiple times in a day and it's suddenly the highest priority. And, for some reason, need to keep seeing the iterations in image form, despite the only changes being to alter a few words on a web page.
Well, that was rather more than I expected to be writing when I opened.
Non work #
I'm on holiday!
This unassuming picture of a couple of circus performers is the last picture I uploaded to Flickr.
It's been a while since I really took any photos, and my pro subscription on Flickr lapsed when I realised all my pictures were taken on my phone and auto uploaded to the cloud and it wasn't worth the investment on Flickr. Well, I've just resubscribed in the hope of resurrecting my interest in photography. Things kind of went awry after a couple of life events. 1) We got a puppy, and 2) I got a promotion and associated increase in work attendance having been part time for a while.
Well, the job continues to eat a lot of my life, as does the dog who is now 4 years old. But after some particularly stressful things going on at work at the level of "I really can't talk about this" I decided I need to take some time to myself and burn through some of my accrued leave. Initially it was going to just be time off to relax, but I decided I might go do some touristy things too. And then I decided I might stay in central London for a bit to accommodate that. And then I dug out the camera. So the plan is a bit vague, but I'm staying in central London a couple of nights, I've got tickets for comedy Sunday night and I'll maybe see something at the theatre and possibly go to the zoo. But I'm planning to reacquaint myself with photography and just kinda chill out a bit.
It's only a half week off work as my husband, Jonny, is taking the dog duty for the first half and I am for the second as he heads off to do fun things elsewhere.
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