Another one of those 'just want to sit here and cry' mornings, although I don't seem to be able to actually cry anyomore.

Depression sucks.

I have been writing software since 1981, when Dad brought home a ZX81. Since then I have used more than a dozen different programming languages, and I still enjoy writing code and using software to solve problems, whatever the language.

I have been SC cleared for about four years, from when my current role within HMRC started. Nominally, the role is 'Front End Developer', but I have been leading on a range of software projects, writing full stack code from the HTML/JavaScript/CSS front-end, though the .Net/.Net core C# MVC web tier, past the Entity Framework/Entity Core database access later, down to the Dockerfile and bash scripts to automate the build.

As an example, a couple of years ago, HMRC needed to update 'COBRA', a Microsoft Access application that was used to track the near-real-time flow of money into and out of the department's bank accounts as customers make payments to us, and as we make payments to customers. The outputs from this app are sent to the Treasury fine times a day to inform them of how much cash on hand the government has.

As a Microsoft Access application, the previous version was restricted to a single user. This didn't fit very well with the high-profile nature of the application, and I was asked to rewrite it as a high availability solution.

I designed the solution around an AWS RDS MSSQL Server instance running in Multi-AZ replication mode. After that, it was a fairly standard C# .NET Framework MVC application, duplicated across two EC2 frontend machines (again, split across two AWS availability zones for redundancy).

My current role is split between development and system administration. The sysadmin part of the role covers creating and maintaining the CI/CD solution for the team. We have been using a self hosted install of GitLab as a git server and job runner, along with copies of Jenkins installed on our EC2 instances to take care of actual deployment.

Most recently, we are in the process of moving to the departments hosted Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tooling; including their GitLab install, Artifactory, and Vault. We are also moving to a Kubernetes (K8S) cluster, so I have been updating our build pipelines to use Docker to make container images for deployment.

Our teams move to .NET Core has helped the move to containers, as ASP Framework apps only really work well under Windows. However, the move to ASP Core on Linux container has meant that we are using Oauth 2 against Azure Active Directory for authentication/authorization instead of Kerberos and local Domain Active Directory.

While the team owns our main project, we are called in to help other projects, since we seem to have a reputation as a team that works quickly and well. For example, last year I was working with the Inteligent Payment Project (IPP) to build them an MVC application to capture data from front line users and submit it to the projects API. I worked with the architect and the product team from early in the design process to make sure that the form I was building was as simple as possible, by avoiding asking the user for information that wasn't needed by the backend process, or that could be synthesized from other answers.

Working as a front line contact center advisor has helped me develop many things

• An understanding of the customer point of view
• The ability to explain complex technical ideas to people from different backgrounds

2005-2017 Call Center Advisor (HMRC)

As a front line call handler I took calls from the public, answered their questsions, and updated systems in line with department policy.

Working in this role helped me develop the skill of explaining complex technical ideas to people with a wide range of knowlege.

2017-2018 Guidance Author (HMRC)

I was promoted into a role with the Guidance team, who are responsible for writing and maintaining HMRCs internal guidance for front line call center advisors and other process workers.

As part of this role I moved to the tehcnical side of the team after updating some ASP Classic Visual Basic to run more efficiently, replacing a runtime of 30 minutes with one of 2 or 3 seconds.

2018 - Current Guidance Development Team (HMRC)

Another promotion lead me to my current role. I am working as a developer and system administrator with the Guidance Development Team. We build and maintain the software that hosts the internal gudiance.

That's NUglify integrated into the site. I've got a new Middlewhere that minifies js/css files, and stashes the minified copies in memory.

I'm thinking about bundling. I'm also thinking about a cleverer cache that will flush to disk every so often, but that's a component in its own right (see also: Image transforms).

Bundles take a list of files and concatenates them, to reduce the number of requests for a page. It's not so critical now with HTTP 2 and 3 reusing the connection, but there's still overhead from headers.

The main problem I've got with bundling is that I want to be able to specify a different list of files for each page, and the best way to do it is not obvious.

The page needs to communicate the list of files to the bundler, and it needs to do it via the browser, since the server doesn't know which bundle request goes with which page.

Having said that, I'm settling on a 'just stick the list of files in the URL' approach, probably using a tag helper to convert something easy for humans to type and maintain into something that's easy for the machine to parse at the other end, probably as the query string.