A chance conversation this week reminded me of how many projects I’ve had a small involvement in and then completely forgotten about. Which in turn reminded me of how negligent I’ve been with week notes (again) so here’s another try.
The big work theme of this week has been recruitment. We’ve been: wrapping up a round of interviews for developers; sifting applications for junior developers; helping a couple of other parts of government shape their plans to build new development teams; pulling together data for a presentation to show the rest of the management team where we are with developer recruitment; and in between all of that there was a day’s training that means I’m allowed to chair civil service interview panels. The training was much better than I’d expected and despite having been involved in a lot of civil service interviews over the past couple of years I came away with a few helpful tips.
The other big work thing this week was that we finally launched the new GDS Technology Blog. That’s been in the works for most of the past year but none of us have had time to really focus on it. The recent release of the new router for GOV.UK finally provided the extra impetus and we launched with an overview of that project. It seemed to be well received, with lots of tweets, some traction on reddit and one suggested improvement to the project from a reader. The latter is particularly exciting, and exactly the sort of thing we want to see come from talking about more of the details of our work.
Alongside all of that I spent a fair bit of time working with some of the GOV.UK teams to work out how to handle some changing priorities without abandoning software that needs support, spent some time with CESG talking about how we assess services for the Digital By Default Service Standard, talked to a couple of interesting small companies about what we’re doing and how they might get involved, chatted with Mike at Etsy to share experiences, and talked with some folks in the Mexican government who are interested in how they could re-use some of the lessons and code from GOV.UK.
But by far the biggest thing this week was our daughter’s fifth birthday. This was by far the most excited she’s ever been about a birthday, and it seems to have delivered. Both parents survived, though between that and hosting some friends for carol singing last night we’re rather tired.