* Plus heaps of preparation and lots of help! — In June a group of FT developers came together for a magical day of sugar and sun fuelled writing in an effort to improve our documentation. By the time we were done we’d improved the quality of the runbooks of our most critical (Platinum tier) systems by 25%, achieved at…

This post was co-authored by Jennifer Shepherd and Tak Tran. At the Financial Times, we often find ourselves having to update tens to hundreds of GitHub repositories at a time. For example, pinning a node version if there is a security patch. …

A little idea that got a bit bigger and more fun in 2018 — This post is a loose follow up to one I wrote a year ago about recording what I was learning each day as a new developer — at the time some of my teammates and I were keeping a record for ourselves whenever we came across something new. …

And better meetings for your whole team to boot — A couple of years ago a Deaf colleague, Ben, joined our team and was regularly accompanied in the office by an interpreter. …

Even though, for a while there, I felt like I should — Part One By the time I was 24 I had been on a diet for ten years. There was the Atkins Diet, the Dukan Diet, Weight Watchers, the Intermittent fasting diet; the three months I only ate cereal; the time I ate Ambrosia rice pudding pots for every meal (coined ‘the white…

Or, Comparing what I learned in December two years in a row — In May 2016 I started learning JavaScript with freeCodeCamp.org. In December 2016, with the help and support of some incredible colleagues (and I could write essays and essays on that, but another time) I entered our organisation’s annual hackathon and committed my first code to the FT codebase. Fast forward…