What I'm doing right now

11 January 2026

👋👋🏽👋🏿 Hello hello! Here’s what I’m up to. Or, you can always read my CV

Reading

I’ve just finished Slow Gods by Claire North. I haven’t started my next book, but it’s going to be The Tainted Cup.

Playing

Just finished Dispatch - we’ve been spoiled by fantastic video games in 2025, and Dispatch has brought me lots of joy. I did a couple of play throughs to see the different paths that your decisions take you… and of course, performed better than 99% of other players during the Dispatch missions.

I’m deep into mucking around with Oxygen Not Included. I’m playing the frozen map (because it’s winter) on the hardest settings 😭. Having a lot of fun with this, it was my most played game of 2025 and I won’t be suprised if 2026 is a similar story. It’s a comfort.

Working

I still work with the fantastic GOV.UK Pay team

I’m not in an actual delivery team at the moment, and instead i’m focussing helping make our yearly PCI assessments ever better than before.

After that i’m going to start some work to help new starters become confident active contributors as quickly as possible from their start date. This is a really important part of getting the ‘experience of working on Pay’ right (I don’t say developer experience, because we’re a multi-disciplinary lot, but do take lots of inspiration from Dev Ex ideas).

I’m also going to work on some training material for leading an incident response with an aim to empower fast decision making when things go wrong.

I also help lead our Accessibility Community of Practice in Pay.

Arthritis

My arthritis hasn’t been kind to me since October 2025 - I’ve been in pain every day since then and my mobility is getting better, but still poor. I’m currently waiting in a queue to get more treatment.

I write about my learning for this on this site because it’s part of who I am, and the life changes i’m going through are significant.