Uncategorized

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. ...

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. ...

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“73”]An early draft of MetaLoca by Chris[/caption]I don’t make it to many hack days. Domestic life with two kids and the tendency of my day job to spill into the weekends make it tricky. But I couldn’t pass over the chance to play with BERG’s Little Printeryesterday the weekend before last. Conveniently it’s also Kari’s workplace, so she and the kids came along and were ably entertained by the BERG team (special thanks to Helen for keeping an excited three year old busy). ...

During the opening keynote of QCon London yesterday Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parsons explored “The Data Panorama” and naturally that involved talking about visualisations as tools to explore large volumes of data. It was mostly very sensible but it reopened my unease about the way we all too often gloss over the fact that the very properties that can make visualisations so effective to communicate large lumps of data also make them a very effective means of misleading us. ...

I really appreciated John Nunemaker’s recent post about the way they’re using Kestrel (a distributed message queue) in Gauges. There’s nothing revolutionary in the way that Kestrel’s being used here, from the post it seems to be a fairly standard use case for it, but it’s a lovely example of detailing the day-to-day work of growing a web app that blogs are so good for. And it’s particularly good to read about the stages they went through as they tested each component in turn, in production, before switching over to them completely. ...

It’s taken me a little while to get to Aaron Straup Cope’s write up of his Personal Digital Archiving conference talk, but I’m rather glad I have. The talk is an exploration of what we might do if flickr disappeared tomorrow; it’s a topic many of us have been pondering at least since the news broke of yahoo’s decision to “sunset” delicious. Two elements of the talk really grabbed my attention. ...

It’s been about ten days and it feels a lot longer, but recently we unveiled a rather important beta: GOV.UK. That beta is a “live operational test” of a new single-domain for government. It’s a radically simplified way for people needing UK government information and services, built in-house with a set of publishing tools that lay the groundwork for a broader platform. This beta came out of the work a team of us did to build alpha.gov.uk, itself a deeply unusual creation for a government website: built by an in house team, ruthless in scope and relentless in user focus, and above all a prototype designed to trigger conversations. The alpha worked: it triggered good, constructive conversations, it helped us identify things that worked and others that didn’t. It paved the way for the creation of the Government Digital Service and to the beta of GOV.UK. ...