Week Notes: March 4th, 2022

Personal note: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine has been in my mind and dominating my quiet time. We have friends & colleagues on my team in neighbouring Belarus, and other teams have colleagues in Ukraine. In the past couple of years I’ve witnessed their optimism ahead of the Belarus elections turn into despair, and I’m worried that it’s all happening again because of the events in Ukraine. The whole situation completely sucks.

Cloudflare Error Pages: Approved ✅

Getting approval from the Architecture Design Forum for implementing custom Error pages was straightforward — hoorah 🙌. As an aside, I have conflicting feelings about the way we handle decision making as a large organisation. On the one hand, we could just build stuff and be done with it; but if we did that, how would we ever keep consistency and control without these checks and balances? And what would force us to document the stuff we build and the reasons why we built them?

Cloudflare Workers plan: Nearly finalised

I’ve been working on a plan for the future setup of our Cloudflare Workers, based on everything I’ve learnt about working with the code over the past couple of months. It’s a mix of high-level questions like ‘who owns this?’ and ‘how do we onboard new teams?’ and low-level suggestions like ‘we should change the code structure to this, and refactor this into this’. It’s quite probably the most lengthy document/plan I’ve put together for the Architecture Design Forum, so we’ll see how it goes. I’m expecting a fair amount of spin-off work questions to come from it.

Cloudflare Workers: New Features

Two neat new features were added to our Cloudflare Workers solution:

1. Error page failovers for proxied content — when combining content from a separate locations via the proxy; if an error page is returned, it is the same error page rather than the error page of the proxy.
2. Default HTTP Headers — if a response is missing a header, the Worker will add a default version of that header; meaning every request on the domain has the minimum required headers for things like Content-Security-Policy, without the need for extra code on the microservices.

Admin work

Admin work this week has been about the pre-golive questions for a new subdomain, meetings about the data structure and definitions for future tech platforms, capturing data for reporting on Performance and GitLab and future CI/CD solutions.

Looking Forward

Unfortunately I’ve not been paying as much attention as I feel I should or could have been to the future tech platform’s data structure plans or architecture. As much as I trust other people to make plans… I don’t, entirely. And I’m conscious that if I have objections to their plans, now is really the time to raise that with them. I think I need to pay more attention, likely independently come up with my own plan for the architecture, and see how that aligns with theirs. If nothing else it should deal with my own nagging doubts.

Other than that we have our monthly Performance Engineering catch-up to come next week, an in-person team gathering, and a workshop session for our Front End Architecture.