Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 23rd January 2026.

My weeknotes for this week are shorter than usual. I try to start writing them on Tuesday or Wednesday, but it’s Friday afternoon and I’m just starting.

This week, I:

  • was an incident coordinator
  • learned even more about BNF codes
  • helped establish some norms about code reviews
  • wondered where my week had gone

Incident coordinator

When a software developer notices that there’s something wrong with one of our systems, they declare an incident in a dedicated Slack channel. Other software developers then help to resolve the incident. To keep them focused, the incident coordinator communicates with everyone who isn’t helping to resolve the incident: mostly users, but also other software developers.

This week, Katie noticed that there was something wrong with OpenSafely Jobs. She declared an incident and, after a short while, resolved it. I was the incident coordinator. So far, so unremarkable. But that’s the point: It takes time and effort to make things unremarkable.