This week has gone by so quickly trying to progress on some outstanding tickets all the while, time spent in meetings to reflect on the organisation's event back in September.

We still have this project with a collection of webpages to be built but the feedback loop between pushing commits and code review is too long and we typically only deploy checked changes to the live site once a week. This coupled with a small maintenance team, means that there is a clear bottleneck in our delivery which is quite frustrating. It's something I need to consider in my career going forward, to ask the question on the ratio of senior to junior devs as this will give you an indication of the anticipated workload and lead time for code review. Although, I need to work on making the commits smaller affecting one or two files which makes it easier for the reviewer.

But most of the week has been spent on preparing for an all team meeting where we discussed our emotions surrounding our work and the event in general. This was surprisingly a nice thing to do and to most private firms it may seem childish, but the impact was that you got to see the event and its pain points through someone else's lens. I think it builds empathy and sympathy and really puts your stresses into perspective and it turns out I had a pleasant experience compared to others!

We also used a Miro Board to identify anonymous feedback left by other team members for which in groups, we were meant to resolve. This was a mixed success activity, but the recurring theme was that teams were under-resourced, not particularly familiar with all the different workshops and presentations going on and there was poor dissemination of presentation agenda- this was usually through verbose emails.

We wrapped up with each team giving a presentation on their teams key performance indicators, which in the context of this organisation, were 5 year goals and a plan to achieve them. For us, we were very ambitious! We agreed on delivering a social network for our 'delegates' to maintain an online community to help better connect them with perhaps other young leaders that they didn't get to meet at the in-person event but share similar values. Sleeping on this goal, I woke up the morning after and in the cold light of day, I am very skeptical about being able to deliver this... We also said we would deliver separate 'websites' to manage the registration process because a lot of it is done manually. Again, no small feat...

Overall, the meeting was good as I think it gave individuals a chance to get things off their chest in a comfortable, professional setting and to receive constructive feedback.

Outside of work, unfortunately this meant I have little time to practice development or any tasks surrounding it. But, at least I got one approved PR from a GitHub repo! It was to apply some styling to card components on a static restaurant site, which were looking a bit dull. #Hacktoberfest2022