Week 18

This week has felt particularly busier than usual.

At the start of the week, I built Card-o-matic - an app to print cards for each story in a Pivotal Tracker project. It takes the card design from Paul Downey’s bookmarklet (which unfortunately broke with Pivotal’s most recent changes), but fetches all the project data using the Pivotal Tracker API. The source is on GitHub but there’s a hosted version on Heroku which you can use.

I also built a dashboard for GovUK Towers to display the upcoming releases we have scheduled in our Google Calendar. It looks just like an airport’s departure board (just add Frutiger!). It should be able to adapt to any Google Calendar feed given the correct calendar URL and API credentials. I’ve dubbed it departure-lounge.

I visited the Ministry of Justice on Wednesday afternoon, to meet their new Digital Services team. There’s a lot of work going on over at Petty France for the MoJ’s exemplar projects, and James told me about the work they’re doing to establish a culture not too dissimilar to that at GDS. There’s also some impressive views over St James’ Park.

Later this week, I worked on fixing a bug with Smart Answers where dates rendered as the iCalendar format were being memoized, leaking between requests. To solve this, there’s now a clearer division between the definition of the calendar, and the actual state of the calendar for a particular request.

I’ve also uploaded my slides from my talk at OpenTech last weekend. I talked about how we redirected 83,000 URLs from Directgov and Business Link to GOV.UK. It was the first time I’ve spoken at a large event, but I think it went well and I really enjoyed doing it.