Week 76

I spent a lot of this week interviewing candidates for the junior developer roles we advertised a while back. It’s the first time I’ve been on an interview panel, and I’m finding it really interesting.

In addition, I’ve had chance to pick up a couple of Search and Browse stories this week. I cleaned up the remnants of an old specialist sector in the search index, which will unblock the ‘Services and information’ page for the Marine Management Organisation going live. I also made a change to Panopticon so that it won’t delete routes for content owned by the Whitehall app. This fixes a problem where an “unpublished” detailed guide showed a generic “gone” page instead of a custom note or redirect (eg. this “unpublished” guide).

We had another chat about the Content Store this week, and how it should handle tags. We’ve still got some unanswered questions around how curated lists of content might work and how we can link between content in a way that’s resilient to changes in URLs. However, it’s good to get more of this nailed down.

On Friday, Neil, Ben, Graham and I sat down to talk about the policies format and how it could look in the future. We know from analytics that it isn’t working very well right now, and many of the existing policies will change in the next parliament (regardless of the outcome of the 2015 election). It also seems like there’s some good opportunities to join up the work we’ve been doing building specialist sectors (which we’re renaming to “topics”). Watch this space!

And this week saw the return of floor meetings to the GOV.UK Team. Floor meetings were a thing we used to do as an entire organisation until we grew too big for one floor. It’s nice and informal and I think it’s really good to bring people together under the guise of being part of the same team, which is something we’ve lacked a bit lately.