Blog posts

[caption width=“180” align=“alignleft”] Royal Horseguards Hotel by pshab on flickr[/caption]One of my favourite things about my job is the range of great buildings I get to explore. This week saw me speaking at The Royal Horseguards hotel which features the longest marble staircase in London. It’s an impressive sight, lined with paintings of former prime ministers and monarchs. I carried my bike up it as there was nowhere outside to lock up. ...

I’m meant to be writing a talk at the moment. Weeknotes feel like a good way of procrastinating. Our daughter starts school in September and the week kicked off with a visit to the school to meet her teacher and learn a little more about the shape of the next few months. We were a little taken aback to discover that a “transition week” is planned for the week after next–rather short notice to completely change schedules–but really enjoyed the time and delighted that E already seems to adore her new teacher. ...

Some people living on a neighbouring street had arranged for it to be closed off last Sunday so that kids could play in the road. Our daughter’s recently become friends with a little girl living over there so we went and joined in with what turned out to be a wonderful event. It was probably partly the novelty, but the fact of the street closure drew loads of people out into the street and there was a great feel to the whole thing. Events like that are one of the things I’m really enjoying about living in our corner of Hackney. ...

This week’s been a good one for coverage of GDS, with Jon Manel’s pieces on Radio 4 and the BBC news site, and Jemima Kiss’ film about us for the Guardian. Oh, and we won a Black Pencil award from the D&AD. But my favourite things have been a couple of talks: Jairo Diaz spoke at the London Ruby Users’ Group about his efforts to re-use some of our code ( Smart Answers). There are a number of things for us to learn from in there but it’s great to hear that the code is useful for others. Jake, who’s been working with us for the past few months, posted his slides from Big Tech Day where he spoke on “how GDS built GOV.UK”. He’s been writing a few blog posts in the run up to the talk like " 7 types of feedback that helped make GOV.UK 7-types-of-feedback-that-helped-make-gov-uk-awesome". Great to see that he can be so enthuasiastic after we’ve worked him so hard! It’s always very nice when other people enthuse about what you’re up to at work. Even better when that comes mixed up with some useful reminders of where to focus and a few things where we can do better. ...

Over coffee on Friday Jordan was enthusing about how much he’s been enjoying writing weeknotes. I’ve been meaning to get back to it since I gave up a couple of years ago but maybe it’s time to try again? The week started with a quick interview for a potential technical architect to join GDS. It’s a pretty tricky role to fill–crucial to what we do–but requiring people who are very hands-on writing code and leading development teams, able to work with a complex range of stakeholders and legacy systems, and also constantly able to keep the focus on the users. That particular candidate didn’t work out but we’ve got more interviews coming up over the next few weeks. ...

In an effort to talk a little more about what we’re up to at work it seems only right to mention the new Government Service Design Manual (and accompanying Digital by Default Service Standard). Their release is the next step in the Government Digital Strategy, providing a guide to what “digital services so good that people prefer to use them” look like and a framework to assess whether new services are ready to launch. ...

I’ve found myself watching a lot of InfoQ videos lately. They’ve been a good way for picking up some new ideas, but especially helpful for identifying other people kicking around similar concepts to those we’re using at GDS and beginning to establish more consistent language for it. This morning’s choice was James Lewis’ Micro Services: Java, the Unix Way which is an overview of how his (thoughtworks) team built a financial services system out of a set of composed services, joined together with HTTP and AtomPub. ...

After making three house moves in the past year or so and clearing out a few remaining items from my pre-GDS office, I have all my gadgets and devices in one place for the first time in a while. It’s now very clear that I need to get rid of a few things. First up is a 2009 model 15" MacBook Pro. I bought it in June of that year and served me well till the 11" air won me over. It’s got 4GB RAM, a 500GB hard drive and a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo processor. It’s running OS X 10.6.8 but could be upgraded. It’s in great shape, but in the midst of all the moving I’ve lost track of the box and install discs. I’m looking for around £700-750 for it. ...

A little over a week ago we launched GOV.UK. Except we didn’t, really. There was frantic work well into the evening of October 16th as people sought to ensure that we’d met all our legal obligations and that the right polish was in place. But we didn’t really launch GOV.UK… What we launched was a cluster of nginx servers that redirect traffic for direct.gov.uk and businesslink.gov.uk (and a host of subdomains) to the correct places on the GOV.UK site that had been in place for months. Our launch was primarily about switching something off, not switching something on. And that was ideal. We made the smallest change we could possibly make, we tested it, and we told people. ...

Now that GOV.UK is out the door I’ve been trying to catch up with my Instapaper backlog. One of the more recent pieces (yes, I’m way behind was Frank Cottrell Boyce’s wonderful description of working on the Olympic Opening Ceremony with Danny Boyle. I particularly loved his description of the way the core team came together: They worked so closely they were practically a hive mind. My job was to join up the ideas in a way that the non-hive dweller could understand. ...