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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. ...

[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. ...