Weeknote 34: Taps-aff

Taps-aff lads.

It's been a warm one this week in the big smoke. An actual reasonable case for going into an office, granted that it's got decent air con which mine does. I would spend more time there than in my ex-council flat with terrible insulation but, besides it being mostly a better working environment for my personally, I am a bit anxious about my cat overheating and flies going into her food. Maybe this is a me problem, I'm not 100% sure.

Anyway this week me and my shorts and my cotton tops did the following:

  • Finished and merged our proposition for applying the new brand to the tech docs gem
  • Released that change with 5.0.0 of the govuk tech docs
  • Merged a change for release next week applying the rebrand to prototype kit management pages
  • Merged another change to the management pages to replace the custom nav with service navigation
  • Cleaned up the pull requests on the prototype kit repo, merging things we want to merge and closing things that are stale or aren't gonna get worked on. 30 down to 5!
  • Helped Romaric make some little improvements to the kit's architecture, mostly silencing warnings in the build output that have been hanging around for yonks
  • Started planning a prototype kit release next week, including some draft comms
  • Had a gander at Ollie's extremely cool early prototype of a set of WebPageTest scripts to assess how services are using some of our features; mostly intended for measuring the rebrand but also that could be used to measure any number of things
  • Made a teeny tiny fix to our automated release script to finally stop it failing at build

The end in sight

I don't have lots of reflections on what I actually got on with last week in that list. It was mostly comforting, uncomplicated, technical work. What has been on my mind is that this massive rebrand project is starting to wind down after consuming my professional life for the last 6 months. I've been wondering if the prospect of a change has contributed to me feeling less burnt out and more in control.

I remember we had to cancel an away day in July because the team were simply too busy to find the time to organise anything and we've now, finally, rescheduled for September. It's a little symbol of autonomy returning to the team and us moving from high pace, high stress delivery to a more considered pace for a little while.

I'll probably reflect on this brand updates project later but I actually feel quite pleased with what we've done. Within the bounds of what we were asked to deliver we've made something good, and snuck in some neat improvements whilst we were at it. The big day is next Wednesday, June 25th. Keep your eyes open for a new coat of paint.

Life updatez

The big cool exciting update is that we've booked a trip to Japan in February! 3 weeks, basically the entire month. This is a redux of when we'd last booked a big Japan trip... In May of 2020. Don't ask how many refunds we managed to get on hotels and experiences. It's very exiting to finally have a replacement holiday in the calendar. We'll be assembling a spreadsheet soon and I need to start a Japanese course on Babbel.

In the exercise department, happy with the amount of strength training I did in the absence of BJJ. I went for a run for the first time in over a year last Thursday and my legs didn't totally fall off which is good. I'm interested to see how BJJ could fit into a future exercise routine that's more complete and less reliant on just BJJ as a source of exercise, which is a bad move.

On Wednesday I went to see The Pill at The Grace and it was a corker of a gig. The sort of short, heavy gig where the band come on, MAX VOLUME MAX INTENSITY, over in a flash. The sweaty heat added to the atmosphere.