Week 52

As suggested by the title, this week’s notes mark a year’s worth of week notes. When I started I didn’t think I’d manage to write them consistently, but I’ve surprised myself.

This week feels like a return to form. I made some things. I’ve been working on a story to group content in specialist navigation pages by their format type, and it’s pretty much complete now. It involved quite a bit of work to the Content API, to add an alternative view for grouped results, and then just a handful of code changes to the existing navigation in Frontend.

Back at home, we’ve had relatives come stay this week all the way from Portugal, so I’ve spent some time with them. We went to visit Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry on Thursday. It’s a very good museum. It used to be the destination of choice for trips at school, and since then I’ve visited a few times and gained a real appreciation for it and its exhibits.

On Friday, we had our monthly all-staff event. I particularly enjoyed talks from Richard Heaton (our permanent secretary) and Alex Evans from Media Molecule. In the afternoon, I talked with colleagues from the Fast Stream programme, who are planning an event for civil servants to learn to code, similar to the day we ran last year.

And on Friday night, I went to see The Drowned Man at Temple Studios. It was incredible. I’ve been drafting a short blog post about it which I might publish.