Started a new contract on Monday, working for Signet Jewellers aka H.Samuel and Ernest Jones based in Borehamwood, North London. It was a hell of a drive, but as usual, I drive to work Monday morning and then stay in the area until I drive back on Fridays.
Work
Spent the first few days setting up my work PC and Dev environment - back to using Windows Windows (yuck!). They use a lot of Microsoft products, so it makes sense for them to be on Windows.
Took a while to get my machine up and running because the team is currently in the process of switching from SVN to GIT - so they're making changes to how they work and how their local development environment needs to be set up. We're just waiting for the deployment pipeline now.
Really interesting to see the struggle that some of these long-time SVN users went through as they changed to GIT. I vaguely remember using SVN, briefly, and I remember hating it and losing work, but I guess it's a mindset thing they need to adjust.
It's going to take a while for me to get used to all this traffic - London really busy and full of cars. From next week I will be leaving my car at the hotel for the day, so won't need to drive to work. This week I stayed in an Airbnb 10m drive away, but there's so much traffic that leaving at 7 am still took 30 mins and then I still needed to find a parking space!
I'm also back to using VS Code, not my choice, but because it integrates better with their Dev environment and the Azure infrastructure - I'll be using it for this contract. This may be something that will likely happen again, so I have saved my custom settings, plugins and themes.
I'll be using Gulp, Sass, Fractal and Handlebars for this contract. I'm glad I finally get to use Fractal - I've been wanting to try it for a while.
Personal
I've not had any time to work on my own website or my freelance project - this is mostly done and I'm just waiting for the client to do their first round of testing.
Bank holiday next week, which means a short week and also my villages yearly Fete, which I help with setting up!
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been thinking about my work and how I'm not really happy with how things have been going - I'm not talking about code things, more the life of a travelling salesperson contract front-end developer!