Purely for the sake of research, and by no means due to me putting it off for a number of weeks for no particular reason, I found myself going through the various steps between 10.30 and 11.30 last night. And it worked without a hitch.

Perhaps part of the reason is because HMRC has greatly simplified the procedure – for instance, I wasn’t forced to enter all the details of The Guardian when declaring the magnificent £75 I earned for a piece on its website – but perhaps a bigger reason is because the team behind the system has done an excellent job in load testing and simulating.

It’s great to see a company, or in this case public service, learn the lessons from previous problems and rare that they get praise for doing so. Somehow, I doubt HMRC will get as much attention this year as they did last: people love to read, talk and write about failure, whereas success just doesn’t make a good headline.

Which rather reflects life as an IT professional as a whole. Make a mistake, everyone notices. Get something right, nobody seems to give a damn.