It’s been a short working week this week and, mercifully, a relatively quiet one.
It’s not been without incident though – in fact, we had our first outage with the digital service this week. For a little while on Thursday morning, our list of trustworthy services was not visible on the web.
This kind of service disruption has never occurred before, so it provided the team with a useful test of its operational readiness.
Did the team have the right escalation routes? Did the team swarm around the problem in the right way? Did everything happen the way it should? These are all questions for the post-mortem that will be done on the incident some time next week.
The first priority was figuring out why it had happened and how to prevent it happening again. We think we have, on both counts. The service was completely restored within an hour of the error being identified.
Thankfully, there was no data loss. In fact, the service was accessible the whole time; it just wouldn’t show any data from the database.
It was perhaps with some irony that I had also decided to gift members of the team with pin badges of our favourite meme this week.
(I love a pin badge and these were 87p each, so how could I not!)
Away from work, my mother has come to stay with me for a couple of weeks.
I’ve still been working during the week, but we’ve had the opportunity to bimble around Croydon and we popped down to Brighton this weekend. Highlights included playing the penny slot machines on the pier (although they are now 2p and 10p machines; inflation sucks the smallest of joys from everything, apparently) and some really good fish and chips from Bardsley’s chippy.