This week I made a lot more work for myself (but in a good way!)

Two important things are happening in OPG Digital at the moment: various new staff are joining us, and it’s the start of the calendar year. So naturally, we’re having a lot of good conversations about what 2020 has in store for our services, platform, way of working etc.

The upshot of this for me personally has been a selection of planning meetings, writing and refining tickets. We’re planning major new features, important rewrites and integrations across OPG services.

All of this leads to fairly mixed emotions: I’m excited to look ahead at the work we’ll do, some of which is going to open so many great opportunities, but nervous about the amount of effort and risk we’ll be taking on. I think pacing will be important: we need to get better at finishing epics before we move onto the next ones.

The other nice side of this is working across different products and service teams to plan and communicate our plans. This week I’ve been actively developing two products and planning across two more. It’s meant working with new colleagues and picking up new skills, which is always awesome.

Summary

• Writing and refining tickets galore
• Finalising and releasing my virus scanner work
• Adding a full user management suite to Serve OPG (using pairing and TDD with AS)
• Talking to JN about React and microfrontends
• Discussing our team testing strategy going forward