### #weeknotes ### What are #weeknotes ? Weeknotes are a great way for me to reflect on my week. I publish them in public because I believe it’s worth spreading our learnings to others. ### Personal stuff For those unaware, I’m trans. The UK has been a pretty rough place to be a trans person, and it’s been getting worse in the last 5-10 years. This week, a court case ([here](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg7pqzk47zo)) made it clear that through a unanimously ruling that, unfortunately, a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law. A court case ruling doesn’t necessarily mean much in everyday life, but it does show: - The UK Government doesn’t see me as as woman, and never will - Government infrastructure has already started updating guidance; such as the British Transport Police enforcing trans women will be strip-searched by male officers ([here](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/17/trans-women-uk-railways-strip-searched-male-officers)) - Seeing people popping bottles and celebrating stripping rights away from a small minority group (trans people only make up 0.5% of the UK’s population) - and, most importantly, the momentum behind the anti trans movement is overwhelmingly strong Fighting back feels possible, maybe, but we’re not fighting back against one court ruling – We’re having to fight back against more than a decade of a well funded dedicated group whose sole purpose is to attack trans people. As an aside, does anyone else notice how these far right groups always talk of trans women and hardly ever of trans men and gender non confirming people, including cis people who don’t want to fit into the gender binary? I don’t see how I can continue to live in a country who legally does not recognise me for who I am, especially one that has such a hateful, far right funded, group dedicating themselves to systematically breaking down any remaining rights I have. This has gotten me down this week, there’s no way around that. I’m not going to make any decisions immediately, there’s no need to jump too early, but it’s increasingly clear my future is not in the UK. How can it be? ## Professional stuff I dived into work stuff to ignore my human rights being stripped away this week and, to be honest, it was a good working week. ### In person workshop I finally had the honour of meeting two of the nicest people for a workshop in Manchester – It was great fun! In some ways I’m quite a bad Product Person, because I constantly overstep the boundary of a Product Person. I’m super interested in the commercial, financial, operations, and people side of businesses. I love when clients let me loose in those areas too! I’m really excited to see everything we can build together, thanks for trusting me with it. ### Release management Releasing code shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s written well, perhaps even written collaboratively with another person, it’s automatically tested, maybe even a little light tough of manually testing something too depending on what it is. It pains me when I see value left on the table because it hasn’t been realised, as it’s stuck in a bloated release management process. More release processes don’t make it safer to release, don’t improve our confidence it’ll work, and push realising of the value further down the line. It’ll need guardrails, more automated tests, and reducing human involvement – but if we do the work we’ll reap the rewards. I’m looking forward to seeing how fast we can release things in the future. ### Show the thing Part of working transparently is ‘show the thing’; talking about the work, feature, process, design, whatever deliverable is good but it’s not great. Great is showing the work. Showing the work makes it real, shows we’re standing behind it, and get quicker feedback. This is a reminder for me to show the thing more, and help people feel comfortable doing so as well. You can find my other weeknotes here #weeknotes