Trial by ordeal

In hindsight, my work today feels a bit like I faced an ordeal and came out the other side.

My last few weeks have been spent working on a new feature for the software my team is creating. Today, there was a demo for some business users, and this new feature was one of the areas that was discussed. Much of the discussion was around how the front-end works, and this wasn’t what I was doing. Instead, I had put together the back-end that feeds it with the information it needs.

This afternoon we spent the best part of an hour planning out a path through the demo, and then making the presentation to the business users. The demo went fine as far as I could tell, and set the ball rolling for this new feature being released “into the wild”.

What I’m pleased about - a small thing, really - is that this work is entirely based on the areas I’ve been learning in the last few weeks. My changes involved lots of JavaScript, and making good use of testing frameworks etc. And, finally and most importantly, everything worked exactly as it should! I have a morbid fear that, with a spotlight shining on the changes, something would fail catastrophically and throw up errors left, right and centre. But thankfully not: a straightforward demo, and no drama.

Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash