Week 494

This week saw us finish our initial stint on the Modern Slavery Registry project, start work with Trainline and say goodbye to James as he headed off for an extended holiday to walk and explore the South West Coastal Path.

Modern Slavery Registry

We came to the end of our initial sprint on this project. I’ve enjoyed the couple of weeks we’ve spent migrating it to AWS, upgrading Rails, moving binary content from the database to S3 and adding various features. I think/hope the people we’ve been working with at the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre have found it useful too.

We’re now in a 1 day per month maintenance phase until March next year. This isn’t something we have much experience of so it’ll be interesting to see how it works out.

We finished up with a short internal retro about the project on Monday afternoon. Despite a couple of concerns about the limited time we had to spend on the project, and about whether we’d delivered two weeks of value (instead of simply two weeks of time), I was left with a positive feeling about the project.

Trainline

Ben, Chris and I started at Trainline on Tuesday. We spent the first couple of days pairing with various people in the team: Chris paired on tracking down a bug in production, Ben paired on deployments, and I paired on integrating a European carrier into the platform. My pair introduced me to Postman and showed me how they use it to interact with the API. We started writing some tests in Postman that should hopefully make it easier to add new carriers in future.

The three of us spent yesterday getting the app running on our laptops. We ended up using Vagrant to get the app and all its dependencies installed and running in a virtual machine and finished the day with a single failing test.

I’ve enjoyed our first few days on site and hope we’re having a generally positive impact (despite all the questions we’re asking :-)).

Until next time.

– Chris