Irregular week notes s01e01
It seems odd that we have stumbled into March already. February has flown by at a great speed, but then the start of the year is never that interesting.
Monday
As a front-end developer who works in a team it is always a nervous time when a new product goes into production.
Watching the first users move around the service was a great feeling. It was also great to get direct feedback from users. It had been a real push from the team to deliver the service over the last couple of weeks.
Tuesdays
My 2nd Tuesday cycles are always a bit weird, due to agile ceremonies. This means there isn’t a solid chunk of a day to get a productive level of work going. One of the things I love that my team does is a Real Time Retro
This has the days of the sprint listed with a positive/negative areas. It is a nice way of gauging a team’s mood over the course of a sprint, rather than a snapshot at the end. This is also a great way to highlight key achievements of the sprint. It is easy to get to the end and remember the negatives.
I’ve also started to use a standing desk at work. I’ve read lots of good and bad articles about them but it feels like a good step to make!
Wednesday
A new sprint means new features. Since joining the agent teams for Check your State Pension I have been refactoring current code, making sure the front-end is well tested and accessible. So it is good to move onto new work streams.
Thursday
I spent a fair chunk of my day helping to develop user stories with a couple of business analysts for future dev features. This involved a data grouping exercise to group scenarios rather than having a huge list.
The first Thursday of the month for me always means a slight odd day with @frontendNE.
Running a user-group is a really amazing thing, I’ve been so blessed with the support around it. Next month marks 2 years, that means it was our 24th event, with 39 speakers and over 2,000 tickets issued. I’m glad to say as we move into the 3rd year that we have amazing plans, we are also always on the lookout for speakers.
It was strange hearing Pattrick talk about the 300ms time delay on older mobile devices and modernizr, both topics a few years ago that were very close to my heart, it is strange how you stop using things.
Friday
Friday was the DWPdigital UX meet-up. It is always great to see what other members of the UX community are working on in other hubs.
One of the biggest changes that coming to Government is the DDaT (Digital, Data and Technology) function across all departments.
This is a positive move for a lot of job families and standardizes the roles across Departments it also shows good progress towards career progression. What this means for front-end development isn’t quite clear, as it isn’t a recognized job family.
On a more positive note, there was an excellent workshop around defining mission statements and metrics around services.
Melanie Cannon wrote a great blog post on “Helping teams define their focus”. This was then taken one step further to help define how we can make sure that the mission statement is measurable.