Well.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it. I’ve been toiling in the mines of obscurity. They’ve let me out for a little while and let me tell you, it is a relief. I’ve not written in…well. In too long.

So I hope you’re well. I’ve thought of you often, you know, as I’m sure you’ve thought of me. I’ve been up to all sorts since we spoke last. Some of it can’t be spoken of. Some of it I simply shan’t speak of. And some of it is simply very boring. So instead let’s talk about what’s happening next.

For the next few months I’m writing code. Code! Me! I know. I thought it wasn’t going to happen again, but here I am, writing the stuff like it’s going out of fashion. For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to get to grips with a massive codebase. For the most part, I’ve done this by refactoring it into many smaller sections of code. These are consquently much simpler to interrogate.

This is very purple prose, isn’t it. I think I’ve missed writing too much. It’ll pass in a moment.

This week I started with a new team: the Digital Backbone team. No, not that one. Or that one. Oh, and not the NHS one. That’s Spine. Totally different. No, we’re this lot. We’re building things for the public sector. The thing I’m working on at the moment is a thing we’ve tentatively called ‘Internal Access’, but we think it needs a new name. It’s not verb-y enough, for a start, and it doesn’t say what the point of the service is: to let you sign into a thing with your public sector email. What kind of thing?

Any kind of thing.

The tech is actually fairly simple, but the challenges are really interesting. This is the kind of thing I’ve been thinking about since I started in the Service more than a decade ago: how do we act like a proper, joined-up organisation when everything is federated? Turns out the answer is to just accept the federation and build something on top.

The team is really excited and energetic about the product, and it feels good. It feels like the old days, when there was joy in writing code. We’ve got an LLM assistant at work, but I’m not finding it enormously helpful for coding at the moment. I’m interested to see if that changes, or if we get given access to other tools. I’m weighing up getting my own subscription to something for some personal projects – my work on the Codebar website keeps stalling because I don’t know Ruby well enough. Though I do sometimes still get to write something that looks nice.

I think this team might also give me something that I can use to finally finish off my Master’s degree, which has taken me far too bloody long because picking a dissertation topic is hard. It’s so hard that I actually started to look at an entirely new degree, just so I could avoid thinking about my current degree. This isn’t sustainable, so it’s probably better if I just knuckle down and pick something.

So here’s where I am, friends. Back in your pockets, in your little screens, for a limited time only before I go back to the mines. I’m going to build something amazing and you – all of you! – are going to help me get the word out.

Onwards.