Week 11

It’s been another short week with Easter Monday being a bank holiday.

I’ve spent a lot of the week working on changes to various smart answers for upcoming rate changes as described in the budget, along with some fixes and updates for some of the FCO smart answers which launched last week.

To explore how we could make parts of our stack easier to get up and running with outside GDS, I wrote some experimental scripts over the Easter weekend for the smart answers app. It uses the Apache server built into OS X to reverse-proxy the Ruby apps, with a few workarounds and app config to get things playing nice with each other.

In my spare time, I’ve also been hacking on Need-o-tron to tidy things up a little bit. We know there’s things we’d really like to change to make Need-o-tron useful again, and I feel like if we can tidy it up a bit, we’d be better placed to decide on its future.

Over the weekend, I’ll be heading to National Hack the Government Day 2013 - which will be my first hack day for almost a year. Given how many hack days I used to attend (before I started working), I feel like I should try and make an effort to do more.