👋 - i said goodbye to my wonderful teammate James this week. We’ve worked together on and off for two years, and he’s been a brilliant colleague, teacher, mentor and friend. i’m looking forward to seeing what he does now, and being friends, rather than co-workers.

🗑 - we had a really good conversation about technical debt on my team this week. after making a plan to prioritize improvements, we reviewed the tickets in our backlog that had been labelled as technical debt and forgotten about. a good few just got deleted as they’d been fixed with other work, a good few were quick fixes, and sadly, a few were security and accessibility related. they’re getting prioritized on Monday.

💸 - this made me think about what actually is and isn’t tech debt. is it code that’s ripe for refactoring? is it code that works, but barely? it shouldn’t be security, it isn’t accessbility, those are part of the work in making a good quality product. it seems that it also gets used as a euphemism for ‘bugs we dont really care about’

📖 - this week i finished up writing the my sections of the reference for our apprentice, and it was wonderful getting to write about how brilliant she is, and how hard she’s worked 💖

💉 - i had my second jab this week and i felt like a train had hit me. i had to cancel a couple of meeting and have a lie down, and it was a great reminder of how lucky i am to work on a team where everyone’s physical and mental health are prioritized. if you’re not feeling great, you say so, and you get told to go and rest, no questions asked, because we trust each other.