Week 81

We had our sprint planning and retrospective on Tuesday. Our team focus is still on building email alerts for subtopics, and everything that’s needed to support it.

I’ve spent most of the week building out new functionality to manage tags in Collections Publisher. Whenever a tag is created or updated, Panopticon has to be kept up-to-date. Eventually, we’ll also publish these tags into the content store. It’s a huge story, and it’s going to take quite a while.

I also picked up a small change to put gov.uk/coal live as a topic page, similar to gov.uk/transport from last week. I love the idea of top-level topic pages, but I’m a bit concerned that they’re too focussed on specialist content, and not very useful to ‘mainstream’ users.

The progress on the GDS code club moved one step further this week: after looking at a handful of different online courses to use for the club, we’ve decided to go with Codecademy’s HTML/CSS course. We’ll use the session time to help people through the online lessons, or provide some extension activities if they’ve already completed it.

I finished reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 this week. I’ve been on-and-off with it all year, but glad I stuck it out. It’s a brilliantly cynical account of the 1972 presidential election between Nixon and McGovern. It’s a must-read if you’re interested in American politics.

Matt kindly gave me a copy of Laurie Penny’s Unspeakable Things, which I’ve started reading. (I’ve got such a backlog of unstarted books that I simply have to start reading more regularly.)