Month note
31 Oct 2024A return to month notes! I enjoyed writing these. It’s a chance for me to reflect on the past month and highlight the things I’m working on or thinking about.
I won’t guarantee the cadence...
A return to month notes! I enjoyed writing these. It’s a chance for me to reflect on the past month and highlight the things I’m working on or thinking about.
I won’t guarantee the cadence...
I’ve been mentoring a dev boot camp graduate and it’s got me thinking about the advice I wish I’d had when I first started out.
The following is a non-prescriptive guide to starting out as...
I’ve returned to work after a longer-than-expected career break raising my daughter –– and moving halfway across the world twice (plus a family health emergency).
The last year has been hectic to say the least.
...I’ll be leaving writing for a bit to focus on relocating back to London and building up my family’s life here.
We landed a few days ago and already I see a mountain of work...
Today I got asked: what are your favourite Terraform best practices?
That’s a big question, and it got me thinking about Terraform best practices and what if they were written by Taylor Swift 🤔
More...
Welcome to my fireside chat with ChatGPT all about site reliability engineering.
On a whim I asked ChatGPT to generate 10 questions to ask an SRE about core concepts and how...
I was recently chatting with some developers and the topic of changing code came up.
We were all debating the question: how do you confidently make changes to an existing codebase?
It was a really...
I’m starting a series called “What is…” (yes Marvel fans, I see you), where I dive into a tool or concept I use regularly.
Sometimes the best way to refresh our minds is to pretend...
You are the solution to a company’s problem. Finding a job is about finding the company which has the problem you are the solution to.
A professional connection said this to my husband...
Tldr: we’re moving back to London.
Back in December we moved to Seattle for my husband’s job.
Unfortunately life threw us a curveball and he was laid off by the Big Tech firm he worked...
It’s been a bit of a stressful month, lots of life things going on and not much headspace to write in depth.
Mostly my mind has wandered to the posts I’d like to write when...
Month notes are back! Well, sort of. I’m in the midst of a rather awful cold and have mush for brains at the moment. In lieu of a thoughtful topic-based piece here’s a summary of...
One of the perks of living in Seattle is I get to spend quality time with my parents which includes being their on-call tech support.
Recently my mom came to me with a fun problem...
I recently got invited to Google’s secret recruitment tool called foobar (aww, thanks Google!).
It’s a series of coding challenges similar to what you’d find on LeetCode etc.
If you’re curious...
Last month I wrote about what programming taught me about being a parent. I’ve found in the (nearly) year of being a parent there are valuable parenting lessons I’d like to bring to my...
I was pleasantly surprised in the early weeks of becoming a mother to realise the lessons I’d learned as a programmer helped me as a parent. Here are a few of them.
I’m taking a break from parental leave to drop another quick announcement: I’ve relocated to Seattle!
After 12 years living in the UK and 10 in London, my partner and I decided to take a...
A bit of an announcement…I’m pregnant!
I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what the experience has been like, especially what’s worked and what hasn’t as a mum-to-be in software engineering.
The individual contribution I’ve been doing has got me thinking about logging on our service.
I’ve been leading on incidents, doing support work, and exploring our codebase for fixes.
I’ve noticed we have room for...
It’s been about six months since our group of new joiners joined the team.
I want to take a moment and highlight why new joiners are so valuable on a team.
They are the best.
...I never know where the time goes! But here we are at another month’s reflection.
This month I handed over the infrastructure lead role to a very capable colleague.
It...
I wrote about leaning out here. I’ve been wondering if the concept can scale or what scaling leaning out looks like.
“Leaning out” is a concept I first stumbled...
The end of the year is fast approaching and I thought I’d take some time to reflect on 2021.
I wrote about being a tech lead
We’re growing our team, on-boarding three new engineers from various specialisms (app development, infrastructure).
It’s a good time to review some of my favourite growing-the-team practices.
I was introduced to this...
It feels weird not thinking about or working on the service assessment
Here’s a quick summary of where my mind has been the last month.
The service assessment helped me...
Good news, we passed the service assessment!
What does this means for the team and the product?
It means our service has passed a rigorous government standard and can be considered a “Live” service.
On...
Just a quick note to say it’s August and like most folks in Europe I’ll be taking a summer hiatus.
Enjoy this time to rest and restore.
This month’s note will be short and sweet.
One month to go!
It feels like I’ve practiced as much as I possibly can. I’ve reviewed our systems over and over...
Another month has zoomed by and I want to capture a few of the highlights for posterity.
I get the feeling I will be living and breathing the service assessment for...
A quick update on the last month. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind of meetings and planning sessions.
We have a service assessment on the horizon (later in the year) and...
This month I transitioned from a tech lead role to infrastructure lead.
Our product is composed of four simple Ruby apps and an ecosystem of more complicated infrastructure components.
We haven’t had an infrastructure lead...
I’ve spent the last few months as the Tech Lead for my team. It’s been both a lot of fun and a lot of work. I’m handing over the reigns to another team member and...
In the spring of 2020 I volunteered to be part of a COVID response project: getting food to vulnerable and sheltering people during the national lockdown.
Since it’s been about a year since I started...
This past month has been busy. I’m glad I got my Linux Home blog out but that hasn’t left as much time for week notes. I’ve been caught up in the whirl wind of to-do...
Have you ever thought about mapping the Linux filesystem on to rooms in a house?
I have. In fact, I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few years.
Whenever I connect to a...
One of the things I’ve learned in my career is that rest can be radical, especially in software development.
There’s constant pressure to do more, build more, blog more, be more active on tech social...
External events (cough the US election cough) occupied an inordinate amount of my attention the last few weeks. However, I’m back with a week note to capture a few thoughts and reflections.
The mini-retro format...
I’d like to try a slightly different format this week: a mini-retro.
I saw a passing note on twitter about an engineer who’d kept a mini-retro diary every day for the last year. They found...
Picking up Site Reliability Engineering: how Google runs production systems again has felt like a breath of fresh air.
It reminded my why I fell in love with reliability engineering: being able to focus...
I picked up programming in my downtime again for the first time in a year.
Just katas for now, mostly in Java because it still feels the most comfortable for me.
It was...
This week has been rather hectic, early starts and late evenings. I’ve tried to keep the post short and sweet: new team things, celebrating Black Tech, the mysterious case of the inexplicable log lines, and...
When I join a new team I organise 1-1s with each new team member. We cover things like preferred communication style, conflict style, how we like give and receive feedback, and how to support each...
It’s been ages since I’ve done a week note – I got a lot of joy from reflecting on the week that was when I wrote them regularly last year and would like to pick...
“Figure out who you are, then do it on purpose.” – Dolly Parton
One of the hardest, the absolute hardest, things in software development is figuring out who you are in the world...
It’s been quite awhile since I’ve written and I want to talk about why. Heads-up, this is a pretty hard-hitting post with some heavy topics.
Trigger warning: mental health, depression, PTSD, and sexual trauma.
I...
I’ve recently joined a new organisation. There are new challenges, new problems to solve, and some really neat infrastructure. The people I work with are smart, thoughtful, and fun to...
In 2018 I took a course on conflict transformation, I wrote about why and how here. This third post explores how we can use different conflict styles in various contexts. It’s a long-format post...
Recently my team lead moved on to a new position at another organisation. It’s been a real joy working with him and his departure got me thinking about what makes a good leader.
I’ve had...
In 2018 I took a course on conflict transformation, I wrote about why and how here. This second post explores ‘conflict styles’ and how we use different styles of conflict in different contexts. It’s...
This is a belated response to my Team Lead’s challenge to fill out “This is how I work…give or take”.
It’s a neat interview format to get a sense of how I got...
Week notes are back!
As I’ve slowed my pace and made space to reflect, I kept returning to some of the lessons I learned reading Switch. They hit home last week when I re-read...
In 2018 I took a course on conflict transformation, I wrote about why and how here. This first post introduces the concept of conflict transformation. I’ll talk a bit about definitions of conflict before...
Time is moving too quickly, I can’t believe how March as flown by.
Taking time to pause was the right choice. It’s refreshing to delve into activities other than writing.
I’ve been revisiting...
It’s been a hectic few weeks and I’ve decided to take a step back from writing. One of the best lessons I’ve learned in my career is when to pause and when to accelerate. Right...
This is an introduction to a series of posts I’ll be writing on conflict resolution
Conflict is really hard.
Most of the time it’s not fun, eliciting reactions ranging from mild discomfort to downright terror.
...I’m trialling a new format for my Week Notes: a summary for each day. The last few weeks I’ve noticed I sneak in tidbits of long-form topics into my reflections.
This makes them more engaging...
What happened to week 6 notes? A long weekend away with my best friend exploring Brighton, that’s what happened.
This week: experimenting with the Google Calendar API, colouring outside the traditional pairing lines, and what...
What a week! I gave a talk on Conflict Resolution to the company and created a tech talk on psychological safety and learning how to take interpersonal risk. Heavy stuff.
It’s been another busy week...
It was a collaboration heavy week and surfaced a few thoughts on the interaction of people and programming. Also introducing Can’t Let It Go to the weekly reflections.
I’m finally fully back in my groove...
This week: testing scripting languages and what obligations do software developers have as historical actors? So a light week then. Leaving aside the tone of levity, it has been an interesting week. One of the...
This week: learning golang, a reminder to check All The Things, and what I’m currently reading. Our CTO gave an interesting talk on delivering value which sparked some reflections which I’ve not been able to...
This post’s title is from my favourite Van Morrison song. It’s a reminder that among all the great days, and there are many, there will in fact be days when situations leave me wondering.
...Although this has been a short week I wanted to begin the habit of a weekly reflection piece, similar to Alex Wilson’s “Weekly Notes”. It’s an opportunity for me to reflect on some of...
This is the first post for the first site I built solely for myself, not something I had to do but something I wanted to build for the joy of programming.
Creating a site where...