Week Notes 22#17

My first week at Deliveroo!

• Lots of onboarding, and learning a bit more about the business and what's going on outside of my team, which was great!
• Everyone's super welcoming and nice, and I'm really happy with the move!
• Been a really nice surprise to be in a Zero Trust environment, so nice to have no VPN
• Got a chance to join a couple of standups, the team's retro and the Friday Tech Huddle which was good
• Went a little above and beyond where I was expected in the first couple of weeks, because it's exciting to have a lot of things to do again, and I'm very much a "see a problem, look at a solution" kinda person
  • Was nice to start making a difference so early on, and it's a nice environment to be encouraged to really get stuck in
  • Definitely enjoying being back to a thriving production environment, Slack instance, and lots of interesting things going on that I can get involved in, as well as quite a few places my previous experiences could make a big difference
  • But it did also a reminder of needing to remember the life-work balance aspect, as Friday lunch I stopped late, cause I wanted (not needed!) to get a PR in
• Got a nice number of best wishes for the new job
• I'm off to London for the annual Deliveroo hackathon in a couple of weeks, which took a bit of deciding due to puppycare, and my family visiting that weekend
• Was so nice to have Carol over for Friday night
  • Had some good chats and was a nice bit of normalcy. Was especially nice to have her meet Cookie, which was very cute
• Got around to backfilling all my listening history that I could find in my Podcast Addict backups, which was a bit of a nightmare because of how few of the podcasts have real permalinks, and how few of the podcast aggregation sites have good OpenGraph metadata
• Cookie has got into the routine of us both being at work for the first time since she's been here, and although some evenings she's been a bit zoomy, she's voluntarily been downstairs in the living room / conservatory instead of in / outside our offices, which is good
  • My office is penned in, as I haven't had time while I've been off to completely clean it up and puppy proof it, which seems to have confused her as she doesn't like being on the other side of the pen 🤷
• After at least a week of thinking "what if I melted Creme Eggs down, and made them a little easier to eat?" I finally got around to it yesterday and 🥁 it was underwhelming. The chocolate just tasted a bit sweeter, and lost the flavour. Although it was easier to eat, and nice to have it all melty, it wasn't quite as nice as a hard-to-eat Creme Egg
• Saturday, the first day of the long weekend, was spent out in the garden. I surprised myself with going out and doing a tonne of clearing of the wall next to the conservatory, but it looks so much nicer, and is a bit safer to climb up the mountain to clean up Cookie's poo
• While out in the garden we picked some rhubarb, and had our first crumble tonight, which was good!
• A gorgeous Siamese cat came into our back garden, but it looked like an indoor cat, so spent a bit of time trying to find the owner, to no avail
• Cookie and Morph are a little more at each others' (luckily not literal) throats, and it appears to be a bit food related on both sides, as they both like Cookie's salmon biccies, and know the fridge door opening sometimes means chicken 😅
• Managed to get Morph over for cuddles three times today, which has been good progress. Not been for the longest time, but just now he was kneading on the blanket with Anna while I've been in the conservatory with Cookie, which is the first time he's done that since we've had her. Huge progress!
• Attended the Cabinet Office Java community catchup - by an invitation before I left - to learn about folks in GDS' Digital Identity teams' progress and difficulties with GraalVM for AWS Lambdas. Good to hear how they got on, and some of the issues they had, as well as learning that they've taken good learnings from my own learnings
• Had our first puppy training class, which was a lot colder than expected as it was outside, and Cookie did fairly well, despite a slightly aggressively wheezing (and a lot of flights of the red rocket) pitbull next to us
• Shaun dropped in to say hi on Monday, which was really nice to see him
• We've been trying a bit more strictly to help with Cookie's separation anxiety, so not exciting her by ignoring her when we come into a room, and slowly increasing the amount of time we're leaving her, which feels like it's helping, but also sometimes really not 😅
• We ran into Blaine the dog - and his parents - on Friday on the way back from our walk around the block, and Cookie had a chance to have a very excitable play with him, which was very cute
• Cookie's new, much larger beds have been really good for her and she's been much more comfy and chill in them
• Saving loads of time grating cheese by using the food processor!

Watched:

• Star Trek: Picard
• Moon Knight
• Human Resources
• Zak George's Dog Training Revolution
• Is It Cake?