Jazz hands

I’ve been in the office on Thursday and Friday this week. Not my usual pattern but a necessary one this week.

Now that the Easter break is behind us, the office has filled back up again.

Thursday involved the new normal of musical chairs, as people roved the office to find a place to sit and work that wasn’t in the kitchenette. On Friday – in contrast – I had the pick of literally any desk I wanted!

(Remember, gang, you have to work from the office at least 2-3 days a week as it’s the only way to effectively collaborate with your colleagues. Even when the team you manage is distributed between at least 4 towns and cities across the UK.)

On our digital service, we’ve been working on improving the way that services are assigned to conformity assessment bodies (CABs) in the administrative system. Currently, every registered service in the system is tied to the body that issued its certificate. If a service provider changes CAB, we need a to reassign that relationship in the system, so the CAB can upload new certificates. That’s being managed through manual database changes currently – not a sustainable basis for the future, but sufficient for an MVP product.

It’s taken us a week or so longer to bottom out than planned, but we think we’ve agreed the approach to how this will work now.

With that now on the way to being built, we can focus on the next meaty problem: uplifts and version control.

On the certification side, we continue to work on the next version of certification scheme. We’re sending this iteration off for review next week with a view to it being the final version prior to legislation coming into effect. Fingers crossed it comes back with a large green tick!

I’ve been putting the final touches to the keynote speech I’m delivering at the European Identity and Cloud Conference next week, in Berlin.

Truth be told, I am very nervous about going. There are a few small reasons:

1. I’m not good at travelling. I love the act of flying, but I barely sleep the night before. I’ll be certain to turn up for everything several hours too early and yet still be panicked that I’ll miss my flight.
2. I’m bad at spontaneously meeting new people; which is the whole point of a conference! I usually get over it; but social anxiety is my constant companion.
3. I don’t speak (very much) German. I can throw together a few cack-handed phrases, but that’s it. Unlike most Brits, I find it deeply shameful to not be able to speak at least a little of the native language if you visit someone else’s country.

The biggest reason though, is I just don’t know if I’ll be any good at it!

I’ve performed (jazz hands-style) on stages in front of literally thousands of people; so it’s not a stage-fright thing. I just don’t do speeches like this very often.

I shouldn’t be nervous. I have a script. I know what I’m talking about (with or without it!). I am ‘expert’ in the topic I have chosen to speak about (or at least the angle that I’ve chosen to take on it). I will be fine!

Breathe, John.

I’ve also – slightly unusually from my usual day job – been doing some other international-flavoured work, meeting with colleagues from one our embassies that were in town and wanted to talk about our work.

Having spent a full two weeks with me, my mother was packed up on the coach and wished bon voyage back to Somerset this week.

Her visit was – admittedly – less irritating than I thought it would be. (I love mum; but I also love the fact that we don’t live together!)

We shared a very, very large bowl of our favourite childhood desert¹ the evening before she left, which was a treat for us both.

Perhaps the biggest news of the week is that I have finally spruced up the baron monstrosity that was my balcony. It’s now adorned with some extremely large trellises and two elongated planters, each with some very eager climbing plants that are already starting to wind their way upwards. I can’t take the credit for the bulk of the execution; I did the wooden structural work and mum did the planting.

Elsewhere, the acer tree and the Californian poppies in my front-of-house planter have burst into life again. It’s really quite beautiful.