Week 59

At the start of the week, I continued the build-out of Collections, our new app for search and browse. I added specialist browse pages based on the code in Frontend, and I enjoyed being able to tidy a few things up, like the stylesheets and controller logic. Later on this week, we deployed the app to all environments, and soon we’ll start transparently routing users looking for a specialist browse page to the new app, instead of Frontend.

One thing we’ve noticed lately is that we each tend to pick up stories from our own streams of work. For example, I’ve been mainly working on specialist browse stories, and Richard has been the same with search. Whilst it’s helped us to ship things quicker, it stopped us sharing knowledge as a team and becomes a bit of a vicious circle. With that in mind, I picked up a story relating to search.

I’ve been looking at including the new ‘unified search’ endpoint in our search health check scripts. This will let us check the new unified search feature to see how well it performs compared to the existing search. So far, we’ve hit a blocker, as the current script actually scrapes HTML from the results page, and we also don’t currently provide a way to access Rummager’s search APIs from outside. It looks like there’s going to be a bit more work to do here than we planned.

We fixed our space this week. The wall splitting our team in half came down on Tuesday evening, and since then we’ve been having fun moving things around and seeing what works best for us.

And on Friday, we received delivery of quite a few Hudl tablets. We’re going to mount them outside each meeting room, so we can show what’s going on inside using Situation Room. At the weekend, I built a prototype Android app to display the dashboard as the tablet’s home screen.