Forgive me if the title seems just a little dramatic.
This week, however, marked the end of my time on my first project at the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, and with it a move to a new project (more on that later!). I think it is important to recognise this, and reflect on it, though. It is pretty crazy to think that today marks five months since my first day in Swansea, and so much has been done, been completed and been learnt since then.
Roadside Payments was an excellent project for me to get started with. There was a fair bit of tech debt, but also a fair few opportunities, for introducing new features and technologies, and improving the overall user experience. I still haven’t forgotten the first bit of code I wrote that then went live to the world - and is still live to the world! Due to the nature of the project, it was very difficult to show it off to anyone, but I was still immensely proud of it. Beyond that small change, I was also able to get started with Node, learning about NPM and its uses, and deploying our own package to NPM. There is a real drive within the Agency to improve our CI/CD processes, so I spent a great deal of time learning about and implementing Github Actions - which was seriously great fun at times. I really enjoy automating things, and working with Ibrahim to automate our integration test suite was brilliant - when the run finally went green, we were ecstatic!
Now, the new project! I’ve moved (with Anna and Ibrahim) to a project known as CPMS - or Customer Payments Management System. It is a centralised system built to handle all payments (well, most of them at least) received by the DVSA. It is very different to anything I’ve done before, including RSP. It is all backend API development - there is no frontend whatsoever! I’m very much looking forward to it, however. I realised on RSP that I actually enjoy backend development, which is something I had never considered possible before. The tech stack is slightly different, which, while it may take some getting used to, is an ideal opportunity for some learning and development. I’m hoping some of my prior experience will help me out here!
To the future!