UK Election this week. My week is evenly split into three: Pre-Election, Election Night and Recovery.
Pre-election my focus at work was end-to-end testing a few scenarios that were theoretically fine, but had not been tested. I’m super glad we did this because we identified a few bottlenecks that would have been tricky to diagnose in a worst-case scenario.
Had the first of several executive-coaching sessions this week to discuss things including how to improve my adaptability: First step is doing a personality assessment which will help me identify my innate behaviours versus my learned behaviours.
The night of the election was fantastic: I was doing the 10PM-4AM shift, so shifted my sleep schedule slightly in the days before. On Thursday I woke up at midday, went to my polling station and went to a sauna session in Bermondsey before arriving at the office around 4:30PM via Rosslyn.
Our systems ran stable (if a little hot) so things were mostly quiet on the night - So I focussed on supporting my on-shift colleagues and was drafted into a few small issues with interactive/live content. Left around 6:30AM in pretty high spirits having handed over to people working day-time. Truthfully so much stuff happened that it's impossible to recount, but it may be one of the evenings I've ever had.
The energy in the newsroom was phenomenal: It was crowded at 10PM when the exit polls were announced, and there were cheers over the night as certain seats were won or lost.
The night in numbers: 1 flat white, 2 teas and 1.5 bottles of club mate. 4 content issues resolved. 13 hours in-office, 7 at brunch.
After it was all over. AM put out a really nice message in our department's channel thanking me for my effort in organising and running the evening, and it recieved a really solid number and variety of emoji reactions. It meant a lot - and if you're reading this, thank-you: It made me smile.
Brunch at Wetherspoons (via the MP). The additional (but unquantifiable because I was too tired to count) caffeine kept me going and after getting home I powered through until 10PM before sleeping for 10 hours solid. It felt incredible.
This week I moved this blog over to Fastly, and in the process have put it and Cloudflare into Terraform. Fastly is one of my favourite technology products and so I’m pretty ecstatic about having it on-hand. It allowed me to remove some Cloudflare workers - I find Cloudflare’s platform unpredictable and have been spooked by recent bill-shock.
Went to JL and LF’s birthday party on Saturday, which started with golf: I won at accuracy in my team, up by 150 points. It started in Watford and ended in Paddington and I made many fond memories on the day.
