<commit_before>---
layout: post
title:  "Senior developers hating code"
date:   2018-01-07 13:00:00 +0000
categories: work
summary: "Thoughts on the culture of self-deprecation in software development, and what I've been working on over the last few months"
---
Recently I came across this tweet:

{% twitter https://twitter.com/saronyitbarek/status/946562500937449474 %}

I found this really interesting. I'm constantly faced with situations where I don't know how to solve a problem, and I think it's part of my job to be able to cope with the unknown and chart a way through it. At the same time, it's really easy to focus on the negatives and downplay accomplishments, when it feels like you should be able to just do stuff without figuring it out first.

So I want to blog more about the work I'm proud of, and the things I like about working with technology. I work at GDS (the UK government digital service), and as a senior developer there I get to work on some really cool stuff.

Since April last year I've been working as a tech lead for [GOV.UK](https://www.gov.uk). Finding stuff on the site can be difficult (it hosts a huge amount of information published by the UK government, of varying quality) so in April we formed a new team to work on search.

The project isn't continuing in 2018, but I think we accomplished a lot in the time we had.

- We made it easy to run A/B testing, and used it to make measurable improvements to site search
- We overhauled the indexing process, so we can easily change what goes into search and can rebuild the search index if data is lost or corrupted
- We left the codebase in a much healthier state, which included removing a lot of code that wasn't even being used
- We upgraded Elasticsearch from a really old version to a slightly less old version!

It was a great team to be part of, and I learned loads about Elasticsearch, search relevancy, and how to be a tech lead. I'll probably blog more about each of these things in the future.

From next week I'll be working on something new, but it should be more data-focused than the development work I've been doing up until now. So I'm back to not knowing stuff, but looking forward to learning new things.<commit_msg>Ugh, can't add new plugins to github pages<commit_after>---
layout: post
title:  "Senior developers hating coding"
date:   2018-01-07 13:00:00 +0000
categories: work
summary: "Thoughts on the culture of self-deprecation in software development, and what I've been working on over the last few months"
---
Recently I came across this tweet from @saronyitbarek:

> There's this fascinating culture of self deprecation (sr devs seem to really like talking about how little they know), which is fine, except that I rarely see people who are actually proud of what they've made.
>  [https://twitter.com/saronyitbarek/status/946562500937449474](https://twitter.com/saronyitbarek/status/946562500937449474)

I found this really interesting. I'm constantly faced with situations where I don't know how to solve a problem, and I think it's part of my job to be able to cope with the unknown and chart a way through it. At the same time, it's really easy to focus on the negatives and downplay accomplishments, when it feels like you should be able to just do stuff without figuring it out first.

So I want to blog more about the work I'm proud of, and the things I like about working with technology. I work at GDS (the UK government digital service), and as a senior developer there I get to work on some really cool stuff.

Since April last year I've been working as a tech lead for [GOV.UK](https://www.gov.uk). Finding stuff on the site can be difficult (it hosts a huge amount of information published by the UK government, of varying quality) so in April we formed a new team to work on search.

The project isn't continuing in 2018, but I think we accomplished a lot in the time we had.

- We made it easy to run A/B testing, and used it to make measurable improvements to site search
- We overhauled the indexing process, so we can easily change what goes into search and can rebuild the search index if data is lost or corrupted
- We left the codebase in a much healthier state, which included removing a lot of code that wasn't even being used
- We upgraded Elasticsearch from a really old version to a slightly less old version!

It was a great team to be part of, and I learned loads about Elasticsearch, search relevancy, and how to be a tech lead. I'll try to blog more about each of these things in the future.

From next week I'll be working on something new, but it should be more data-focused than the development work I've been doing up until now. So I'm back to not knowing stuff, but looking forward to learning new things.
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