Blog posts

Really good piece based on lessons from building out eBay’s cloud infrastructure. “Ephemeral abstractions are things that fail. These may not recover from failures. The best example is a compute (e.g. a VM) with a local disk, an IP address and a hostname.” and “You still need the ability to create parts (e.g. a VM or a network port or a block of storage) when creating durable abstractions, but most users of cloud shouldn’t have to deal with such operations.” ...

Most of my days are filled with short, small meetings and catch-ups. On a good day I make time to prepare for all the meetings that fill my calendar, making a few notes on each one. When I do that they’re more productive and I’m more effective. But until now I’ve not had a good way to bring that together with the calendar that directs me through the day. So I threw together a quick app to help me build up an annotated schedule for my days. My go to language of late has been Go, but I’m still a bit more productive with ruby and rails so it was an easy choice. This was my first chance to try the 4.0 (4.1, in fact) series of rails. There’s not enough to the app to really get a feel for it, but the new secrets.yml file was useful for keeping all my environment variables organised. ...

This post originally appeard on the Technology at GDS blog. Other teams around government frequently ask us about our use of GitHub, and rather than bury those answers in email it seemed time to follow Mike Bracken’s directive and publish (not send) our answers. I’ve made some assumptions here about readers’ familiarity with a few concepts about version control and deployment. Hopefully between the post, some links and the comments we’ll answer many of the more frequent questions. For a deeper look at git check out the freely available book Pro Git. ...

So it’s been nearly a month. I had intended to write a review of 2013 over the Christmas break but between travel and family I decided it better to just let that slide and ease into the new year. We were in Chicago for Christmas and Nashville for New Year, arriving home about a week ago. After a year that involved quite a few trips across the atlantic I’d become fairly blasé about jet lag, but repeating the journey with small children has been a reminder of how bad it can be. Which led to a heavily caffeine-dependent week. ...

This week held two highlights for me. The first was attending our daughter’s first school Christmas play. Having been petrified of standing up in front of people to the point where she refused to take part in her nursery’s graduation ceremony, all of a sudden there she was taking a starring role in two back-to-back productions of “The Whoopsy-Daisy Angel”. We were proud parents, many photos were taken, and it was also great to look around the room and realise how quickly so many of the other families at the school have become familiar. ...

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. ...

I’m heading to the US again in a week. I’ll be in New York from Sunday 27th to Wednesday 30th, where James Abley and I will be speaking at Strata about " Information Revolution in Government". I’m then heading to Boston/Cambridge for the day on the 31st to speak at MIT Civic Media. That’s a public event, but you’ll need to RSVP at least 24 hours ahead of time. And finally I’ll be in DC for the day on the 1st November to meet up with a few folks. ...

It didn’t take me long to break the the rhythm of week notes. Travel has a way of doing that, and so do small children who decide to wake at awkward hours. The week before last felt was a full one, with several interviews for developer roles, some more time spent rolling out new line management for the team, some work kicked off around how we manage “place” information and some time introducing a few of the Ministry of Justice Digital Services Division folks to CESG. ...

In a complete change of pace from last week’s attempts to write weeknotes, I’m sitting in the rather pleasant Koko Coffee & Design shop in Amsterdam enjoying a short break with Kari. After the pace of the past few weeks even a couple of days’ slowdown is really rather welcome. The big features of the past week were Sprint:Alpha and another GDS all-staff gathering. The former was a chance to report on progress on the transformation programme GDS is leading to help departments transform 25 services across government. It was great to see such a broad range of people there and to see some coverage appearing from people like Rory Cellan-Jones. ...

It felt like I wasn’t in the GDS office much this week, a theme that may well continue over the next few. Monday started with a really good workshop reviewing the skills and teams DWP are going to need for their exemplar services. It was one of the first opportunities for the group of us who are leading the various disciplines within GDS to work as a team, and as a result the session felt really helpful for us as well as (hopefully) for the folks from DWP who joined us. ...