Week 1

We used to write week notes regularly at GDS, but we have so much happening right now that it’s a lot harder to keep track than it used to be. I like how Matt Sheret keeps his own personal week notes. I’m going to give it a try.

I started this week at GDS at our Sprint 13 conference at the QEII conference centre, which turned out to be a really interesting event, particularly the Open Policymaking workshop I attended. I’ve spent a lot of this week continuing work on travel advice, bringing together the first iteration of the country pages, and adding the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s list of countries to our content api. I’ve also started work on a ‘discovery’ spike to look at where we could make improvements to our search across GOV.UK. Today, we had an internal event to showcase our ideas for the coming year, where I talked about a proposal to overhaul the Need-o-tron.

Aside from GDS, I’ve done some more work on Anthology, an app for running a community or office library. Each copy of a book now has its own page with history, and you can see the most recently added books on the homepage. I’ve replaced jordanh.net with a simpler site with Jekyll on GitHub Pages.

And finally, I passed my driving theory test last night, meaning I can now go ahead and take my practical test in the coming weeks.