Hawkida

Week note 1 and London reflections

2025-07-20T01:00:00+01:00

Week note 1 #

In which I don't have a lot of week to note but while I'm trying to build a habit I log things anyway.

I think I want the thrust of the week note to be work related, with asides about the rest of the week, and non-weeknote entries to speak more to the general life side of things. But for that I'd need to be better at writing things, so here we are.

Work #

I was only around for a couple of days this week, having taken leave to do my London fix. This meant I spent a fair chunk of the time catching up on what I'd missed and going through emails. Going through emails is quite annoying at the moment as we're switching away from the Google suite and into the world of Microsoft. I'd really rather not, but that's the decision we're living with. Unfortunately it's a slow transition with some people eagerly adopting the new world and their new email address and abandonning the one that could never reach inbox zero, while others are needing to preserve access to a bunch of things in the old world so only glance at the new things from time to time. This leads to a lot of messages not being seen very quickly, and even more messages being duplicates of something sent to the other address as well. And don't get me started on what it's done to the calendars... I also forgot to switch on my out of office, leaving a couple of people seemingly ignored which I berate myself for every time I think about it. Sorry people!

Aside from catching up I've been trying to make sure one of the teams feels well supported in August as people take leave which of course has an impact on the people who'd usually be collaborating with them. We have a good culture of keeping work/life balance in check and supporting people to take time out, but it does mean juggling people's responsibilities a bit sometimes. One of the things I took on as someone was heading out early to spend some time with kids, was launching a page I had no right to take the glory for as others had done all the hard work. But after a long time waiting for the go ahead, we linked out to an interactive map we built with help from other departments, which is to help demonstrate the value Labour is bringing in supporting the NHS: https://www.gov.uk/missions/nhs/progress

I also spent a bit of time at the end of the week noodling around with animation in CSS. There are all kinds of things in the web world that I never need to use at work because of the nature of the site we work on. We have to be backwards compatible to support old browsers because we're not a business and users have no alternative to choose if our site doesn't work for them, whether they're on superfast broadband and the preview version of the latest greatest browser, or trying to navigate on 3g on a crappy mobile they inherited as a cast off. Animation ticks some of those boxes but it's also largely unnecessary sugar to jazz up a page. And as such I know practically nothing. I poked around trying to make bubbles fizz in a poorly drawn glass, and while I borrowed code and tweaked it I can't say I fully understand why it's behaving the way it is - I plan to find out though. This was part of a challenge one of the frontenders is running for the whole discipline where we're invited to contribute to a group picture that builds up over a month or several - the whole point being it's an opportunity to flex atrophied knowledge of the more decorative bits of code. Felt like I should set an example by contributing now and then.

Non work #

Went to London. Forgot how I don't walk around much any more and overdid it a bit when avoiding tubes because "it's not that far".

I went to:

the London Postal museum, where I got to ride a train under the city as though I were a letter over a decade ago
the Secret Comedy Club where I enjoyed the host and 5 of the 6 acts. And a cocktail.
London Zoo where I met the noisiest otter and got a great photo of a tiger, but didn't see a lot because of resting overworked feet
The National Theatre where I watched Nye
a closed door I expected to enter to see the War of the Worlds immersive experience. I'd booked for the wrong day. I failed to pass on the ticket, too, which was a real shame.
the Monument to the Great Fire of London. Lovely views, but it cost me six quid to walk up a LOT of stairs and I was already exhausted!

Then I went home because although I could have spend a few more hours there I was tired and didn't spot anything relaxing to do, only active things. I miss having all this stuff on my doorstep and no dog holding me back from embracing it all. I should have taken better advantage of that time!

Pictures! #

City break and week note zero

2025-07-12T01:00:00+01:00

Week note 0 #

In the grand tradition of many others I'm going to try to hold myself to updating weekly. I'm not sure how much work related content I can provide as a lot of my work is confidential at one level or another, sometimes due to the nature of the forward looking work that hasn't actually been communicated to colleagues let alone beyond, and sometimes due to it involving people. People matters always come with a level of privacy concern linked to them, so it becomes tricky.

Work #

Some things of note this week:

we had a mini incident during the week whereby some config brought down the site for about 10 minutes. However all the things we put in place to avoid such things being disasterous kicked in, so it was largely invisible to users unless they were trying to use the site search. We squeezed in the incident review at the end of the week it happened in instead of the following Monday due to leave. One of the best things about working on GOV.UK is that the no-blame culture is very real. People aren't scared to say "oh no, I broke it!" and get all hands on deck to figure out what's gone wrong and sort it out. It means that people will be open about their mistakes, and everyone learns from them, and we take away real actions that will help to prevent future incidents. Reviews of such things have a lot of potential to make people feel bad but our positive culture meant it was actually a really nice positive way to go into the weekend.
I had a few meetings doing a forward look for recruitment needs. We've been through a lot of recruitment freezes and people alignment over the last couple of years but we're finally able to start thinking about which teams could use being bolstered a little, which will be a really positive move, especially since at the moment one stint of unexpected leave has teams considering putting things about capacity onto the risk register.
One of the teams I work with has completed a discovery piece of work over the past month and a half. It's solidified some thinking, and raised some extra points, giving us a clearer plan for what to do next. It's been quite a satisfying phase of the project and our user researcher in particular has done some sterling work getting departments involved with what we'll be building from the centre.
Another project that seems to have been running way longer than it should have, is about to go live imminently as well. This piece is one of those where you spend ages waiting for a stakeholder to give input, then they want to iterate multiple times in a day and it's suddenly the highest priority. And, for some reason, need to keep seeing the iterations in image form, despite the only changes being to alter a few words on a web page.

Well, that was rather more than I expected to be writing when I opened.

Non work #

I'm on holiday!

This unassuming picture of a couple of circus performers is the last picture I uploaded to Flickr.

It's been a while since I really took any photos, and my pro subscription on Flickr lapsed when I realised all my pictures were taken on my phone and auto uploaded to the cloud and it wasn't worth the investment on Flickr. Well, I've just resubscribed in the hope of resurrecting my interest in photography. Things kind of went awry after a couple of life events. 1) We got a puppy, and 2) I got a promotion and associated increase in work attendance having been part time for a while.

Well, the job continues to eat a lot of my life, as does the dog who is now 4 years old. But after some particularly stressful things going on at work at the level of "I really can't talk about this" I decided I need to take some time to myself and burn through some of my accrued leave. Initially it was going to just be time off to relax, but I decided I might go do some touristy things too. And then I decided I might stay in central London for a bit to accommodate that. And then I dug out the camera. So the plan is a bit vague, but I'm staying in central London a couple of nights, I've got tickets for comedy Sunday night and I'll maybe see something at the theatre and possibly go to the zoo. But I'm planning to reacquaint myself with photography and just kinda chill out a bit.

It's only a half week off work as my husband, Jonny, is taking the dog duty for the first half and I am for the second as he heads off to do fun things elsewhere.

Late

2025-06-06T01:00:00+01:00

I stayed up late overhauling my website in the hope of getting into a blogging habit.

Time will tell, right?

Tittle

2025-06-05T01:00:00+01:00

First in an occasional series of random interesting things I learned from podcasts.

The dot above the letter i is known as a tittle. It never occurred to me that it might have a name other than “dot” since we talk about dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s so regularly, but there you go. The reason it came about was to distinguish the difference between combinations of letters that could be confused in the popular gothic style of handwriting when it was first used. Apparantly, the original symbol was a small crescent oriented like the letter n and placed above the small line representing “i” but it diminished over time – at least until pre-teen girls started replacing them with hearts!

Thanks for this factlet are due to Grammar Girl and her Quick and Dirty Tips.

This is my first post.

2025-06-05T01:00:00+01:00

This is not a writing blog.

This is not a tech blog.

This is not a gaming blog.

This is not a photography blog.

This is not a journal.

It’s all of those things and none of them. It’s commentary and exploration and opinion.

And, if I get it right, it’s communication, connection, feedback and discussion.

Welcome aboard, enjoy the ride.