Week 56

I started this week picking up a couple of smaller stories in our backlog. I updated the specialist navigation pages to use the new beta notice inserter provided by Slimmer, and I also worked on creating a new mainstream browse subsection to help the HMRC transition, called “Dealing with HMRC”. Later this week, I’ve worked to include organisations in the search index for non-Whitehall content, so that we can start to build scoped search across the whole of GOV.UK. It’s meant bringing some of our old indexing code up-to-date with our search libraries.

On Tuesday, I had quite a few meetings and chats with various people around GDS. We had a retrospective on the UKVI transition that happened a couple of weeks ago, to talk about what went well and what we’d like to do better next time around. We had a separate discussion about an infrastructure problem last Friday, where some documents on GOV.UK weren’t available for a short period of time.

I went to see The Drowned Man for a fourth time on Tuesday night, with Matt, David and Ben. It is still excellent. I spent a lot of time outside the studios this time around.

On Wednesday and Thursday this week, I travelled to Brussels for a meeting of the Young Advisors Group at the European Commission. We talked about Code Week and where we’re at with plans for this year, and it was good to work on things together in the same room. A group of Digital Champions from all over Europe told us about what they’ve been doing, and where we could offer more help and clarity. We also had a few hours with Neelie Kroes, where we discussed things like coding in the classroom and net neutrality.