Professional: coming up to a major release. Spend time with my manager and helped him prioritising the work that needs to be done. Managed to convince him to take a time-consuming but redundant task off the board.
Personal: spend an evening looking at our finances. Resulted in:
cancelling 5 subscription services
switching energy supplier to a better deal
reducing credit card limit
increasing the monthly payment into our savings account
Professional: Very productive week at work putting the finishing touches on an in house monthly accessibility newsletter I’m calling A11y With Ady. Got through tons of PRs, ran a a11y session for new starters, reviewed Typeform for a11y.
*Personally: We have taken in a friends dog while they are going through some things. Roxy is a gorgeous spaniel cross and the second one we have fostered. We also bought an annual pass to Bolton Abbey so we can do more walking. Been twice already. Can’t say too much but a friend got a job offer and I’m absolutely overjoyed for them. They deserve it so much after putting so much work in over the last few years.
Celebrated my husband’s and my joint birthday on Sunday (yes we really were born on the same day!)
Got frustrated with my pandemic hair and lopped it off that same day with the poultry shears, and it came out looking surprisingly decent. Feels like I’ve been liberated!
On the professional front:
Participated in our company’s three-day hackathon and made a fun little bot for our Slack channel that will look up owners of various subject areas for folks
Reviewed a bunch of pull requests and was able to deliver actual useful feedback
Was able to answer a couple of tricky questions about unit test data, database migrations, and a specific service that is used by some of our customers
Been a mad week this week but some definite wins along the way
Released our “Personal Reputation and Brand” episode of the Testing Peers podcast
Finally got an upgraded work laptop from Windows 7 to Win 10
had a great mentoring session with a mentee, helping them to build their internal testing culture
presented my “Growing a culture of quality” talk at an internal lunch and learn and got some great feedback
got called “the biggest asset we have in technology” by the Director of Tech
we got a major release out the door on time with a high level of confidence
helped a friend/colleague with a talk she is giving to an all Muslim girls school on leadership and successfully introduced her to an ex colleague who is an inspiring tech leader to help out
made progress putting my family time first by cutting back on external evening stuff including discussions on taking a break from MoTBucks events
found a swimming group for my boys which actively supports children with Autism, so my eldest won’t be as overwhelmed
had a productive Testing Peers retrospective despite my tech issues