This is a bit more of a personal and vulnerable weekly roundup than usual, because I’ve only been at work two days this week and have spent the rest of it feeling like I was dying (okay, might be a bit of an exaggeration that) so I didn’t really learn much useful stuff professionally. So let me share some learnings on Covid and some reflections on my year. Maybe my ramblings will still be useful…

This will be my last weekly roundup this year, so I hope you have had a fabulous 2025 and are excited about what next year will bring. Have an amazing festive break and see you soon!

Covid can do one

I’ve been unwell with Covid for the last week and a half and let me tell you, it has been rough. The new variants (stratus and nimbus apparently) both feature “razorblade throat” as a symptom and I can confirm that it is horrendous. It’s amazing how much I take for granted that I can swallow without pain and how quickly this thing took that notion away from me! I spent just over a week not being able to do much more than nap and watch TV and even now, though I feel about 95% better, I still feel exhausted and am prone to coughing fits when I exert myself too much.

The most ridiculous thing about all of this is that I had the Covid (and flu!) jab back in October and it still didn’t stop me from getting infected. I guess it just shows that you can do everything right and still end up being struck down by some pesky little virus. It’s so very easy to forget that Covid exists now that the lockdowns are behind us and things are sort of “normal”, but it is definitely still out there.

I did spend the week before I got ill doing a lot of stuff - I went to a tech meetup, two gigs and was out and about a lot besides that - but I don’t think stopping all of that is the solution either. It is extremely frustrating that I’ve had to take over a week out of work and have been unable to do much to keep my spirits up, but I’m not about to go back to being scared of everything and wearing masks whenever I go out.

What I will do is make sure that I always have lateral flow tests in the house and if I notice that I’m getting cold/flu type symptoms, I will test myself. I will also be sure to keep standard cold and flu medicines around so if I do get sick, I’m prepared. Something that really helped me this time was having lots of nutritious frozen meals around - a side effect of cooking more meals from scratch and not being able to finish them all, but it felt so good to just heat up some soup made from the organic tomatoes my friends and I grew over the summer.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, except that Covid sucks, I’m not going to let it scare me off and I looked after myself pretty well if I say so myself. The only thing that I have found tricky is knowing when to come back to work - I started work again yesterday and even though I felt ready in the morning, I found myself floundering by the afternoon. It’s a judgment call we all have to make I suppose, and it’s not always easy to get right, but I was so darn bored of lying on the couch watching TV and I’m excited about my new job, so I can’t be blamed for going back a little earlier than I perhaps should have.

I suppose that leads me quite nicely on to some musings about this year…

Thoughts about 2025

This year has been full of change for me on a professional level. I started this year at the Economist, where I’d been since 2020, but on a completely new team to the one I’d been a part of for the preceding 4 years. It’s easy to underestimate how big a change switching teams can be - my new teammates were (are!) extremely lovely, which did really help, but ultimately I found it quite stressful moving from a spot in the company where I knew the codebase and domain inside out and I was the “go to” person to effectively being a newbie again.

I put myself under a lot of pressure to know everything immediately, which didn’t help - musing on this now, I wonder how much the title Staff Engineer contributed to that. I felt like people were looking at me going “they must know everything” and that I had to embody that. The thing is, I was actively trying to dismantle that image by asking the “stupid” and “silly” questions and by telling people I didn’t know everything, but it never really stuck somehow. I am still figuring out how I can stop this from happening in future and it’s got me stumped. I’d love to hear from other engineers who have felt like this and what you did to combat it. Maybe this is just too much a part of my personality and this is something I’m going to find difficult to change, who knows.

Related to that, I also put myself under lots of pressure to keep the engineering initiatives I’d started as a Senior going, even though I had far less spare time - I would run bi-weekly lean coffee chats for engineers to have a catch up and somewhere to go to ask questions, I was running the Front End Community of Practice with my colleague (still so proud of us Matt, if you’re reading this!) and I was mentoring several colleagues and running various other catch up sessions during the week on top of all of that. I find all of these things extremely valuable and I was struggling to see how I could possibly drop any of them.

In hindsight, I can see how much of the pressure I felt was self-induced, but I honestly felt like if I didn’t carry on with those initiatives, nobody else would take them on and that it would be a great loss for the other engineers. It felt like I’d be a bad leader if I didn’t continue, I suppose. The eye opener for me has been that I have left now and as far as I know, the department hasn’t collapsed, so there was absolutely no need for me to keep all of these plates spinning single-handedly.

That was the other big change for me - after nearly five years at The Economist, I felt like it was time to move on and I spent a fair bit of time this year job hunting. I eventually decided that I wanted to take a step back down to Senior Engineer because it was the last time I remembered really enjoying my job and I was hoping it would result in a reduction in the relentless pressure I was feeling. I started at Octopus Energy in August as a Senior Front End Engineer and it has been absolutely wonderful.

I am loving being closer to the code again and have had some fairly big realisations about myself - how I’m just a JavaScript developer trying to write TypeScript (getting better all the time!), how I wasn’t as good at Playwright as I thought (again, fast catching up here), that AI is actually kind of useful and experimentation and “playing” with it is better than trying to use it under pressure and that I might be more of an extrovert than I first thought because I miss going into the office. I am very fortunate to have gone from one very lovely team to another very lovely team, but I do feel like it’s so much easier to get to know people and feel connected in real life than over Slack. In the new year I’m going to try going into the office twice a month. Hopefully that will help.

Anyway, I am a complete newbie once again, getting to know the ins and outs of a new domain and a new set of codebases, but somehow it feels more acceptable now. Is that because I’m a new starter? Or because of the title change? Who knows! I do know that I am extremely excited to get stuck in and get to know everything about the projects I’m working on and the domain we’re working in and to become that “go to” person I was again. There’s something extremely satisfying about being able to answer pretty much any question thrown at you. Though that one might just be me!

Plans for 2026

I am very hopeful for 2026 and have lots of professional as well as personal plans. I will definitely be updating my blog more often as I have been doing lately - I enjoy writing and it’s something I don’t get to do as much in my new job as I did previously, so it’s nice to have an outlet for it.

I haven’t passed my probation in my new job yet so that will be the first hurdle to overcome, though I am hopeful that won’t be an issue. It certainly feels like things are going well. I’m also planning to do some more talks at work and to start helping my team with some big ongoing migration efforts. I haven’t been able to help as much as I’d like so far, just because I’m still getting settled, I’ve been working on other things and I don’t have as much context as some of my teammates. I love a good migration though, so can’t wait to get stuck in.

I’d really like to do a talk at a meetup at some point this year, though I find this extremely scary, so I don’t know how successful I will be at it. Somehow, doing a very targeted talk at work to an audience I know are going to be receptive is a lot less terrifying than submitting a talk to a meetup, where the audience is broader and might not be so interested in what I have to say. Anyway, I shall think about it and see if I can’t find a way to make this happen this year. Ultimately, I’d like to speak at conferences, but baby steps…

Personally, I am planning to grow many crops at the allotment, make lots of new garments for me to wear and read a tonne of books. So the usual for me then! I can’t wait :)