Kept up a fair bit of exercise this week.
Spent Tuesday evening making pizza with my daughter as part of her school work. We actually started on Monday evening because we made a sourdough pizza dough and we wanted a slow bulk fermentation. The pizzas came out well.
Some boring bits of life-admin.
I closed my old web hosting account at last. I moved a some old domains and personal blogs that I maintain for friends and family over to static sites using eleventy. I tidied up an old blog of mine and did some housekeeping on old posts. There’s a bit more to do, but most of the content I want live is live. I’ll address the various pieces of broken formatting and design as I get time and inclination. None of the sites get any traffic to speak of.
I spent far too much time trying to plot my weeknotes title and numbering style. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, just me trying to bring a small sense of order.
The week started with a deadline. GDS is starting to use a new framework to assess the skills of people working in “digital data and technology” professions. We had a submission deadline and the early part of the week was spent checking all the submissions for my line reports. There’s a new tool to submit the assessments. It’s not the most user friendly; there’s no proper feedback on past submissions and line reports cannot see when their line manager has validated their assessments. Slightly annoying because I really want to make sure my line reports have their assessments correctly submitted because it can affect their pay.
I spent much of the rest of the week in meetings. The routine meetings included senior tech and leads planning sessions as well as GOV.UK’s developer community tech fortnightly. Ad hoc meetings centred around digital identity. A good overview with tech colleagues on the digital identity team and another longer half day session which was more general and included different disciplines.
Tech fortnightly was interesting - Richard showed us how he had repurposed one of our publishing apps as a personal blog.
I spent some time going through some threat modelling for one of our services and did a little research on MITM attacks.
Worked with one of the developers on the team to explore autoscaling a little.
I also looked into our current special leave policies and shared it around with some people at work. Several people in the developer community are finding it difficult to balance work and life at the moment. Parents are, anecdotally, finding it difficult being both a full time employee and teacher.
I started reading 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know because Dean has started a book club.
I started to think a bit more about how to onboard developers.