This week I handled handover. One of our five developers left this week, and another is going in a couple of weeks. Nothing nefarious, just the end of their contracts. Whilst we’re in the midst of recruitment to fill their boots, we’re also ensuring everything is handed over: not just work and knowledge but also permissions and responsibilities. Losing staff is always sad, and always a risk. These two have been excellent colleagues and in part that’s been clear by how easy handover had been. Rather than everything being left to the last minute, we’ve spent months planning and preparing for this. It reminds me of an axiom that I believe is credited to Netflix: that every developer is responsible for making themselves redundant. That plan a bit singularity-enticing, but I’ve always found it’s good to work as if you’re leaving next week. It leads to good practice in general and makes you much easier to work with.

Summary

• Fully implemented autowiring. We’re seeing some of the benefits of how this works already.
• Ensured succession of our departing WebOps colleague by engaging with the WebOps Community of Practice
• More bug fixes based on alarms
• Prepared for automation of switching organisations’ ACLs: we’ve been doing this manually so far, but hope to big bang all the easy ones next week
• A bunch of risk analysis, ticket planning etc. in preparation for being a smaller team.
• Read Richard Pope’s fantastic playbook for Government as a Platform (YMMV, but this is exactly my jam right now)