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Week 26: Commuting

Frankie RobertoPosted on

Photo of me smiling with a blue NHS branded lanyard around my neck

First week of daily commuting to the Canary Wharf office this week.

I still haven’t quite worked out the optimal route. There’s several options, all involving a change, and the difference seems fairly minimal so I’ve been switching it up on different days. Getting the Elizabeth Line still feels novel but wow is it busy in the morning.

I had a triple breakthrough in the office as I now know who to ask for an NHS lanyard, how to use the printers, and where the laminator is kept.

Having a branded lanyard sounds like a small thing, but it’s a nice token of belonging, and soon everyone was wanting one. It’ll also be helpful when going out visiting hospitals and pharmacies as it’ll make us look more official.

We now have a board in the office (with some laminated signs I’ve added), so we’re hoping to encourage people to post up examples of their team’s work.

Whilst some days in the office are quieter than others, I’ve always found at least someone to talk to and have lunch with, so I’m counting that as a win.

Design debt

In the office, the content designer and I have been sat together collaborating on identifying and fixing some of the minor ‘design debt’ issues in our service.

These are a collection of minor content and layout issues which individually have been too small to get prioritised and given to a developer to fix. However now that I can run the code locally, we’ve been mostly able to make the changes ourselves.

This was super satisfying.

Release cadence

We did a release this week which added a couple of new features that have been designed and developed over the past couple of months.

For various reasons, it was a bigger release than usual as it’s been several weeks since the last one.

We’re hoping to move closer to a practice of smaller, daily releases.