Weeknotes  

Monday 05 Apr - Sunday 11 Apr 2021

Monday

It was Easter Monday (a UK public holiday) so I:

• Walked our dog Ted around one of his favourite parks.
• Did some prep for my first day back at work for a few weeks which included:
  • Breaking out a fresh new Baron Fig notebook.
  • Deleting old code repositories for previous work.
  • Clearing old browser passwords, history and sessions
  • Reading up on my new team and their work.
• Cleared my home office junk cupboard.

Tuesday

Day 1 of my new job.

I joined the Digital Land team at the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government as their new Senior Interaction Designer.

I did new starter things:

• Used the waving hand emoji for the first time in MHCLG slack.
• Joined my first team stand-up and said hello to everybody.
• Spoke to Matt our product/delivery manager for an overview of the work so far.
• Got access other tools used by the team (Github, Trello, Etc).

I started at the end of a sprint, so got to hear about everything my new team had been doing in the end of sprint playback session they run. Genuinely very impressive, the variety of work they had got through and how well it was presented back was very good to see.

I might have talked about it here or linked to the team’s week notes at this point but it less than ideal time for my writing about work.

The UK is in ‘a pre-election period’ which means civil servants (of which I am now one) observe a ‘purdah’ to maintain political impartiality.

So with that in mind I won’t be writing about most of my work for a little while to avoid getting myself (or likely Paul my end-level boss) into any bother.

Wednesday

• Drank a lot of strong coffee due to our puppy having a restless night.
• Started setting up my machine for the development environments used by the team so learnt how to get Python up and running and how it’s package management works. (Similar to Node but with occasional confusing differences!)
• Started writing a list of questions for my new team.
• Joining a new team is a little easier when you are distributed because meeting software tells you the names of people on the call. A blessing for me because my brain’s capacity for remembering names is shocking low.
• Simon Wilson did a nice thing, introducing me in a Slack channel to other designers in the organisation.
• A check-in call with Paul to talk about how I’m settling in and the up coming work.

Thursday

• Spent some Time with Colm talking about design systems, front-end development and being walked through some of the team’s design and development practices.
• Had a chat with our product manager Tom
• Lucky to receive a brilliant introduction to Planning from Euan
• Still not got full access to Office 365 yet but it is in progress and these things are always a bit tricky
• At the end of the day my standard issue device arrives. A Microsoft Surface Pro.

Friday

• Lots more admin. Filling in forms for Human Resources and that sort of thing.
• Reading and experimenting with some of the existing digtal land code repositories on Github to help get myself up to speed.

I’d love to hear any comments or feedback. What would you like me to write about? Drop me a line on Twitter.