I'm struggled to think what to write about in this week's roundup - hopefully I've still managed to think of something useful for you all. I've just been plugging away at things really, getting the next feature I've been working on ready for deployment. We're almost there now, though as explained below, not as close as I thought we were...

Saving time with CircleCI

I managed to fit a tech debt ticket in-between everything else going on this week and it's something I've been wanting to add to our codebase for a while - the ability to only re-run failed tests in CircleCI, rather than having to rerun the whole job from failed. CircleCI has a pretty comprehensive guide on how to do this and with the help of Claude, I had this up and running in not much time at all. I did this work in two phases - firstly I added the store_test_results step to all our test jobs, which meant we got some useful test insights in the UI - you can see things like which of your tests are being flaky and how long your tests are taking (on average) to run. Once that was in and well established, I did the second part, which was to update the test command itself to use circleci tests run. This command allows CircleCI to run your tests in parallel, but also means it knows exactly which of your tests failed and therefore, which ones to re-run. This should be a lovely timesaver for the team as instead of Re-run from failed, folks will be able to hit Re-run failed tests - I tried this with a single failed test and it reduced the time taken by about half. If you have CircleCI and haven't done this with your tests yet, it's worth checking out.

Making assumptions

The big feature I've been working on for the last month or so is almost ready to be deployed. We had one last meeting with stakeholders this week to make sure everyone was happy and, predictably, there were some things we'd missed that needed to be addressed. This is fine, it's part of being a fast-moving organisation, but I had sort of assumed I'd be moving on to something else by the end of this week and that didn't end up happening. I'm not annoyed about it, I think it's just a reminder to myself (and maybe to you) that until something is actually live and being used by customers, you can't assume it's finished. And even then sometimes we have to jump back onto something and hotfix or otherwise update stuff. I had hoped to get some time to spend on personal development, but that will have to wait until next week. Hopefully I'll be able to write about what I learn!

In person time is important

I had another reminder how important it is for me to go into the office this week. It helps that our London office is a lovely space with all the free coffee, tea and snacks that you could ever want, but really it's seeing people in person and having some social time that really helps my mental health. Being able to wander over to someone's desk and have a quick chat hits different than sending them a DM on Slack and I always find I learn so much more about what people are working on than through updates in an online meeting. We went for a team lunch, which was delicious and so much fun - my team really are a lovely bunch of people. So yes, I will continue to go in twice a month, by choice - I know that's controversial for a lot of people. I guess I would like to clarify that just because in person time is important for me, it doesn't mean that I think everyone should go in - if people work better remotely and prefer not to see their colleagues at all, that's totally up to them. I just find that my mental health is hugely improved when I see folks in person.