Week 83

I’ll start with the big news: I’ve moved to London! It’s only taken me three years of commuting to finally get a flat here. I’ve spent evenings this week visiting IKEA, buying towels, building furniture, and realising just how much I don’t know about living.

I’ve been picking up a variety of things on Search and Browse this week: I fixed a bug in our new email alerts where links to changed content would link to the GOV.UK homepage, rather than the piece of content itself. I paired with Richard on a story to step through the email alerts stack, working out the potential failure states at each point. Richard’s now writing up some stories for monitoring or mitigating each of these. I finished the week picking up a story to add pagination to our new feed of latest changes to content in a sub-topic.

We ran our first code club at GDS on Thursday evening. I was really pleased with how it went: it felt like we had a good atmosphere where people were asking lots of questions. We’re teaching HTML and CSS - mainly building on the Codecademy course - and doing additional work to link this back into GOV.UK. Massive thanks to Rob, Barrie and Alex for helping out.

And I went along to the ‘Leadership Academy’ on Tuesday afternoon. It was the first of six sessions about leadership, being ran by the heads of the Efficiency and Reform Group. I was pleased that there were other GDS people there (about half the people in the room were GDS folks).