This heat

The size of it all carries us along
More equals better, it’s what we want

— “A New Kind of Water”, This Heat, 1981

Amazing how heat distends both matter and time. The whole week has felt like a fever dream. Apparently we had quarterly planning. That feels completely wrong. I had to re-look at my calendar to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Alas, yes, it was four days ago.

I discovered that carbon steel – what train tracks are made out of – melts at approximately 1400°. I also discovered that 35° weather is enough to potentially break all of the train lines in this country. That seems like something to get on top of given, y’know, the atmosphere and melting ice caps and ocean currents and everything.

Quarterly planning is normally an in-person affair, but due to the threat of all of the train tracks expanding and then buckling because it is a little hot outside, we moved things online. We were supposed to run the event in Leeds this time. Leeds is too far away from London to walk.

The event is much less enjoyable when held this way. There is so much less serendipity and every discussion has to fit into a pre-planned 30-minute slot. It is incredible how the mere presence of a defined time slot in a calendar can dictate the length of a discussion. Words and walkthroughs expand or constrict to fill the available space, as logged in Outlook. Time might be a flat circle or it might be a set of 15-minute triple-booked slots; depends who you ask (Matthew McConaughey or Microsoft Outlook, in this instance). I do not like this particular timeline we find ourselves in.

Planning events for the App are interesting because the App is also basically half the organisation at this point. Half of the organisation did not come to our planning event. That feels like it might become an issue, in time. There are plans afoot to institute a more devolved approach, to make it easier for a wider range of teams to do App things, but those plans are not yet complete or ratified. In the meantime, we continue working to join the dots and bridge the chasms and any number of other metaphors for trying to get a shed load of teams to work together without everything exploding.

My hayfever has been horrible. I’ve been taking allergy medicine to ward off the sneezing and runny nose and itchy mouth (yes, really). The medicine works, but it also makes me feel balloon-headed, a little dissociative perhaps, and like I’m about to get the flu.

I’m on a panel at a King’s Fund this coming week and I’ve been working on my talk for the start of the event. I won’t be using slides and it was only when I was several hours into working on what I’d say that I realised that I have never actually presented publicly without slides before. With slides, my approach is a bit collage-like, gathering materials and trying to find a nice set of juxtapositions. I shape and reshape the story to make the interplay of words and images work. The process is kind of squishy. Without an image track, it is just normal writing. Make an outline, flesh it out, say it out loud a few times to get the timing dialed in, done. Less of an exploration, more of a linear sequence.

Not sure I’ve had more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep since last weekend because of how hot it has been. That might also be playing into my sense of time.

There is a certain sense of incoming pressure with regard to more and more teams wanting to do App-y things. It is so difficult to keep track of everything. We’re not yet arranged into the right shape to handle this well. We’re moving in the right direction, and progress is being made, but we also need to clarify who is in charge of the wholeness of the thing.

The rest of my little UCD Ops gang are also concerned. There is too much happening and too much uncertainty about everything. In our normal catch-ups and on Slack, there is a general sense of exasperation at the sheer volume of coordination and project triage we need to keep on top of. We repurposed our normal retro and planning time to focus on gathering a list of all of the work we’re involved with and all of the things we’re worried about. Once it was all written down, it was apparent that there are many, many things to do. There is too much to deal with at the same time, but at least now we have the beginnings of a to-do list.

Where are all of these flies coming from?

I did a little show & tell about Quiver at the NHSE design huddle on Thursday. I had forgotten that I'd suggested the topic to the organisers a few months ago. I figured I would only need 10 minutes to do a walkthrough, but it turned into a 40-minute demo, somehow. There were some good, practical questions (Q: Could this eventually replace Mural? A: Not entirely, but for mapping and collaborating around said maps, I think it could) and others that were a little more what-even-is-work-today (Q: How much of this is you, and how much is the AI? A: Most of the code is AI, but the ideas are me). I was in the office because the office has air conditioning. Over the course of presenting the tool and its various aspects, I became progressively sweatier. I wondered if I was just nervous about presenting (which isn’t like me). Turns out the air conditioning in the office had just stopped working.

Bless Lucy and Elliot for bringing everyone in my part of the office ice cream.

Our work on the native replatforming is ticking along. We’ve started pulling apart our prototypes into the beginnings of a design system package and a prototype kit, feeling our way through it little by little. That and asking actual native developers how to do it.

While we make plans for native design systems, we still need to contend with the web side of things – the web app version of the NHS App isn’t going anywhere. It isn’t clear how we deal with the long tail of web elements that’ll need support for years to come. I’d like to divest ourselves of the web-based design system and upstream anything useful to the Service Manual team. We’ll see.

The organisation’s current stance on code repositories being public/private due to concerns about frontier AI models is becoming a frustrating blocker. I can’t show you all of my nice PRs right now because they are private.

I worked from home on Friday. It was 34°. So: hot. But in the context of sitting outside, in the shade, reading under a tree, that heat is actually kind of nice. I mean, sure, it is a bit warmer than I’d choose if I had a say in the matter, but this is also just how hot summer is where I grew up. I’ve lived in the UK for 13 years, but this kind of heat still feels normal to me and it isn’t particularly challenging. If I had access to a beach, the weather would be great. After lunch, as soon as I was back to work: awful, miserable, oppressive, the worst. My sense of temperature, much like my sense of time, turns out to be rather subjective and context-dependent.

I find thunderstorms somehow comforting. Pressure climbs until it must release – there is an electrostatic discharge, rumble and rain, and a drop in the heat, even if just temporarily. As a kid we learned how to calculate the distance of the storm. This was probably just a way to make us less scared, but it worked. It provides a means to put distance between yourself and the terror of uncontrollable forces, to take the measure of the material world and put it in order.

Planning is over, for now. We’ve got lists of issues to work through, in ranked order. That should help deal with whatever escalating pressure the org throws at us next. Things are ok and the temperature has come down a bit. It’ll come back; it always does.