Week 501

Ben and Chris L were both on leave this week, so this was bit of a quiet one.

Chris R and I spent most of the week pairing on a story at Trainline. It felt like it took us a long time to make the actual change, but this was mainly because we were trying to find the best way to write an intention-revealing failing test. However, I’m confident this all was time well spent, because it meant we learnt a lot more detail about how the system works and how it’s currently tested.

On Tuesday, Chris and I paired remotely all day using Slack’s built-in voice call and screen-sharing. We had some minor issues related to Chris’ microphone, but otherwise the whole thing worked extremely well. In fact I can’t remember a long video call or a long screen-sharing session ever having gone as well as this before.

I’ve previously discovered that it makes a big difference to my connectivity if I connect my laptop via ethernet vs wi-fi when I’m working at home, so perhaps this was partly why Slack worked so well. Also perhaps it’s significant that we were using a paid-for product (we’re paying for the Standard Slack plan) when in the past we’ve often used free services.

On Friday, Chris R did some more work on preparing to move the Modern Slavery Registry website from Heroku to AWS while I caught up with my GFR Trello card backlog.

Chris tried out a co-working space in Kingston as he hasn’t currently got anywhere easy to work on the boat. Although it didn’t get off to an auspicious start, because nobody was there to let him in when he arrived, as far as I know it worked out pretty well.

Until next time.

– James