February 2026 – Planning-Inspectorate/appeals-back-office: Tightened testing for document handling, streamlined production deployments, and resolved user-facing issues to improve reliability and user experience. Delivered reinforced end-to-end testing for document scanning, production-ready CI/CD configurations, and stability fixes that reduce deployment risk.

January 2026 highlights: API performance and reliability improvements for appeals data, plus automated bank holiday management. Delivered targeted API optimizations to appeals endpoints by loading only necessary fields via middleware and refining relationship mappings, reducing data payloads and improving cross-endpoint accuracy. Fixed a critical data linkage issue by ensuring relationship IDs are included when fetching appeals data, stabilizing downstream dashboards and reports. Launched a cron-based bank holiday updater with secure secret handling, environment variable management, and MSSQL-backed data access to keep holidays current with minimal manual maintenance. Infrastructure hygiene improvements include env-var refactors, new secret access patterns for scheduled tasks, and role assignments for key vault access. These outcomes drive faster responses, better data quality, and stronger security for ongoing operations.

December 2025 — Planning-Inspectorate/appeals-back-office: Delivered a focused set of API and data-handling improvements that reduce payloads, boost responsiveness, and strengthen data integrity across appeals workflows. Implemented middleware-based selective data loading to trim responses for key endpoints (appeal data, questionnaires, representations, decisions, site visits, inquiries, etc.), and hardened the appeal submission and representations data handling. Streamlined document retrieval APIs with standardized endpoints and fewer required appeal IDs, complemented by updated tests. These changes improve operator efficiency, reduce data transfer costs, and lay groundwork for future scalability.

Month: 2025-11 — Planning-Inspectorate/appeals-back-office Key features delivered: - QA Testing Endpoints for API: Added endpoints to test sharing IP comments and LPA statements, review final comments, set up site visit and hearing events, and issue decision completion. Maintenance / changes: - Remove S78 Hearing feature flag across code and environment configurations to simplify workflow and ensure hearing procedure is always available. - Remove SECTION_20 / S20 feature flags to simplify logic for appeal types and related components. CI/CD / testing improvements: - End-to-end testing automated with Cypress in GitHub Actions, including a Docker-based test environment for CI reliability. Overall impact: - Higher test coverage and faster feedback in CI, reduced maintenance burden from feature flags, and more predictable deployment workflows. Technologies/skills demonstrated: - API testing and test automation, Cypress, Docker, GitHub Actions, feature flag management, and refactoring across web/api/infrastructure.

Concise monthly summary for 2025-10 focused on planning-inspectorate appeals-back-office. Delivered enhancements to Start Appeal API testing to improve reliability and coverage for the Start Appeal workflow.

November 2024 monthly summary for developer work focused on stabilizing telemetry instrumentation and aligning secret management across two repositories. Key issues resolved and robust telemetry infrastructure established to improve monitoring, incident response, and business visibility across environments.