I didn’t write a blog post yesterday as I was busy celebrating the Digital Marketplace turning 5 with my team! I was quizmaster at our party, which meant I got to ask questions like “How many disco balls do I keep on my desk?“1 and see if everyone has been paying attention.
Today I got a good chunk of code written: the coding vs engineering ratio is slowly healing itself. It was especially satisfying to get my local branch into a state suitable for public consumption - it’s been hanging around for a week now, unpushed, which always makes me itchy. It’s no coincidence that my last big effort on the story was a week ago: our team has agreed that Thursday afternoons are to be kept ‘meeting free’, and I can safely stick my headphones in without missing anything crucial. As such, Thursday afternoons have become coding afternoons.
This week I had a good soundtrack to accompany me! At lunchtime it was my turn to ‘take over’ the GDS #club-music Slack channel and post some of my current favourite tunes, all from this year and all made by women. Here’s a Spotify playlist. All the tracks are familiar enough to me that I won’t get distracted, and they are boshing enough to make for a productive coding atmosphere.
1The answer is two! I turn them on when something ‘exciting’ is happening. I also have a blue flashing police light which rotates at a pathetically slow speed because the battery is running down. I have no idea where any of them came from, they just appeared one day.