Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 9th May 2025.

After a hiatus, weeknotes are (hopefully) back. In the last six months, I’ve become a dad, taken a month off, and become a tech lead. Nevertheless, these are weeknotes. What happened this week?

Several things happened this week, but I only have time to write about one: I was frustrated by an idea that I keep hearing at work. Namely, that you need a copy of production data for local development. Or, if you’re not using a copy of production data when you’re doing local development, then you’re not doing local development right.

Certainly, it’s handy to tinker with a copy of production data; you can tailor a user interface to fit a long string or to fit domain-specific words and expressions (“jargon”). Having a copy of production data also makes replicating bugs easier. However, production data can be large. They can also contain personal data, which must be removed before a copy is made. And once the personal data are removed, the copy is no longer a copy of production data.

Time’s up!