In less than 12 months, Drupal 7 will be end-of-life and no longer supported. Plan your upgrade to Drupal 10 now.

My first six months at Transport for Wales

It's been a busy six months since I started working as a Lead Software Developer at Transport for Wales back in June.

My main focus has been being part on the development team for the new tfw.wales and trc.cymru websites, which replaced the previous tfwrail.wales and trctrenau.cymru websites.

Some of my personal highlights have been:

  • Completion of the initial phase 1 project that went live in September, based on Drupal 8.9.
  • Upgrading the phase 1 project from Drupal 8.9 to 9.2 over several iterations alongside new development and other BAU tasks.
  • Creating containerised versions of each of our applications using Docker, creating consistent local environments for us to use.
  • The introduction of automated testing and other code quality tools, such as PHPStan for static analysis, for any new code, and automating this using Bitbucket Pipelines and the new Docker images.
  • Continuing to work with a range of technologies - Drupal, Symfony and API Platform, Vue.js, TypeScript, Acquia Cloud, and Amazon AWS and S3.

We've already been working on the second phase of the TfW websites, integrating some of our other websites, and adding new features whilst continuing to maintain and improve the existing codebase.

I'm currently supporting another project team at the moment too - their project is going live next week - and will look into writing more week- or month-notes going forward.

I've continued working with Neovim as my daily IDE/text-editor tool, have continued working on my freelance development and consulting projects, and started to squeeze in some more live streams too!

Was this useful?

Sign up here and get more like this delivered straight to your inbox every day.

About me

Picture of Oliver

I'm an Acquia-certified Drupal Triple Expert with 17 years of experience, an open-source software maintainer and Drupal core contributor, public speaker, live streamer, and host of the Beyond Blocks podcast.