Week 53

The start of this week was the end of our team’s first sprint. I’d finished up the work I’d been doing last week, so I spent a bit of time hacking on the Release app to add a view of all recent deployments, which I thought might be useful.

On Tuesday, we had our first retrospective, and moved onto our planning session for this sprint. It took a little while to get there, but I think we now have a decent mix of stories for both search and specialist browse.

I helped out with a bunch of urgent work around the UK Visas & Immigration transition on Wednesday. The sections on the Visas and immigration browse page needed some changes, along with some extra items in the “popular links” group.

I also helped release the specialist browse page for Immigration operational guidance on Friday. This seemed to have fallen through the cracks and I don’t think anyone owned it, but it was the missing route through to important content for UKVI’s specialist users. It turned out there were a few issues preventing content from being tagged properly. I fixed those and deployed a change to Frontend to set up the new browse page.

On Friday, I went down to Whitehall for a lunchtime event as part of the Cabinet Office’s “Digital Fortnight”. There were short talks from a handful of people around the Cabinet Office. I liked Rod Sweek’s talk about how the team behind the @Number10gov Twitter account use analytics. I also liked Amy Khan’s talk about the GOV.UK style guide and some tips when publishing departmental content to GOV.UK. In the latter, I ended up talking a little bit about how we’re improving search.

I went to see The Drowned Man again on Thursday. It was as good as my first visit last week. Still working on a post about it.