Second week of weeknotes! In a row! This might be the start of something, you know?

This week with the team has been really good. Everyone came up to Manchester for an away day. We got dinner and a better sense of who we are as people and as people who work. We’ve started to tentatively form up objectives and key results for the next quarter, as well as formalise some of the roles and responsibilities in the team. Scaling is always kind of a shame in that sense, I think – you can’t make decisions as a small group with shared context, so you need to build scaffolding around it. When you externalise data you introduce the risk of misunderstandings. When you delineate work you build boundaries and domains, and with boundaries and domains come encroachment and transgression.

You can also go faster. Infrastructure is the thing that means you don’t need to reconstruct context from first principles and allows a basic sense of ‘the team’, whatever that is, to be shared with newcomers. Specialisation of work is literally the underpinning of the modern economy, for which you can thank a smith. It is nonetheless a thing that I have feelings about and, I suspect, other people do too. It’s possibly to do with the fact that I like working with people I have a good relationship with, and with each division and subdivision the relationship becomes a touch more transactional.

It also means I can’t be as nosy and interfering as I naturally am, unless I’m specifically hired for a job where the brief is ‘find the problem, fix the problem, if you’ve run out of things to do re-read this brief”. That’s…alright, that’s also more of a me thing. There are no really good reasons not to have domains and externalised knowledge.

I just wish we didn’t have to use Jira.

We also got together this week to start to think about what we need to call our product. It’s not necessarily internal access only – you could set it up for groups on the periphery, for example. It’s literally single-sign-on-for-whoever-you-think-needs-access-to-your-thing, but that’s a horrible mouthful and can’t be effectively acronymised¹. We’re trying to figure out whether ‘the public sectory’ is a brand in and of itself, or whether practitioners would identify with the GOV.UK brand – as they do with GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify. And indeed whether we’re even allowed to use it. There’s a lot here that’s complex, which is why it’s a really good thing we’ve got an expert in this field on our team.

In between those things the three engineers who are working on the system got together to talk engineering and ways of working and geek out about PKCE (pronounced ‘pixie’²). I stuck my oar in on git messages and how important they are. My view is generally that there are three truly awful things in the world. The third worse thing in the world is being woken up at 2am because of an incident. The second worst thing is discovering that the offending code has a message attached that says something like ‘fixed issue’.³ So we are not going to do that. We are going to write beautiful, clear, context-preserving commit messages in the way that I have not always previously done.

Life is still going well. No, I’m wrong. Life is going amazingly. One of the reasons is that I’m going on holiday in May and have finally booked all of the travel. We’re heading to the south of Spain entirely by train. By first-class train, no less. I cannot wait. I saw The Importance of Being Earnest on Youtube on my television with a friend who’s never seen it and thought, actually, there are some good things in the world after all. I am as happy as I’ve ever been.

See you next week. I might have more to tell you.

1. The modern process of naming things is to answer the question: can one make an acronym of this? If the answer is no, the entire enterprise has to be rethought. ↩︎
2. See what I mean? ↩︎
3. The worst thing in the world, according to a new colleague, is cheesecake. The more you know. ↩︎