It has been a humid and sweaty work week for me (he writes while SW London enjoys rain showers), travelling in and out of London, on and off of trains. Tree bark pollen count is high and for a person who does not have severe hay fever (I've never needed to resort to antihistamine or other treatment), even I have had a blocked and runny nose and irritation to my eyes.

Work wise, it has been a productive week with some stoppages as I come to expect. I also went to my first tech careers fair in-person (please check out my SMR 2022 article!) and this has galvanised me to contribute to and attend more tech events like conferences and hopefully a hackathon!

In terms of work, it has been mostly spent on Drupal 8/9 theming course on Drupalize.me and I am grateful that the content instructor(s) has / have curated reference text accompanied by video tutorials. This really helps to learn new unfamiliar material and serves as a useful go-to resource in the future. I'm about a third of the way through, it's slow and steady but it will give me the base knowledge to tackle these types of tickets on theming.

I'm finding the issues we get although on the face of it appear straightforward, when it comes to implementation, they require discussions with other developers and content teams to tease out all requirements. We tend to act on incomplete information and progress the issues when more details are drip-fed to us. It's perhaps why things progress slowly, and these small bugs and defects are lower in the priority list. Nonetheless, it's great for me as I get more efficient with this style of workflow and also pushes me to seek out the answers from other team members (I'll admit, in-person office quick 5 min chat to iron out requirements is more efficient than WFH slack or emails). I'm lucky that our organisation management pushes for this type of approach as I'm aware in other organisations, people don't like being approached in this manner!

Apart from the back-and-forth of tickets and background learning for them, I had a few meetings (apart from regular work meetings):

• Apprenticeship monthly or quarterly targets: what came out of this meet was a SMART goal to improve my knowledge on debugging and software testing. I appreciate it's an important stage in the SDLC, but I have no prior experience in it. Having these written targets and plan of action will hold me accountable and force me to learn the subject when it is all too easy to put it off and make an excuse for not doing it. I'm currently on CodeCademy learning about unit testing in JS and researching best practice on debugging.
• GitLab CI/CD webinar: a whistle-stop tour of CI and how our company could leverage what the DevOps platform has to offer. The majority of the talk was lost on me: I assume most attendees have experience in this already so the speaker used technical jargon and glossed over some complex topics. No matter! The team at GitLab upload their talks to YT so I can play back and get some notes on the stuff I missed.
• Drupal evening training session: now that we have our server and site functioning for the most part, we are learning about the configuration files that run Drupal. We spoke about the use of PHP hooks and their purpose, controllers and the MVC concept why render arrays and elements are important. Each of these are broad subjects which I again need to invest more time into understanding what exactly they do. It's appreciating what's going on under-the-hood which is what I am trying to achieve in these lessons.