Week 73

Quite amusingly, last weekend’s Reddit antics got quite a bit of attention on Monday night. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve heard “then make him Queen” this week.

On Search and Browse this week, I released the new Panopticon functionality to add a workflow to tags. Based on last week’s collab session, I wrote some stories about the new “curated” specialist sector browse pages. We had our retrospective and sprint planning on Tuesday, and I think this sprint is looking in decent shape.

I’ve picked up a story to put our new “Services and Information” page live for the Environment Agency, Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and UK Visas and Immigration. We didn’t quite manage to get this live this week, but it should be out early next week. However, it’s quite nice to get chance to work on the Whitehall app.

This week, I’ve been working with Ali to write a proposal for a new project to make improvements to our intranet. It’s going to the Ops Board next week. I’ll write a bit more about it soon.

I seem to have worked on quite a few hacks this week. I made a simple monitoring dashboard for the tablets we’ve installed outside our meeting rooms, backed by Redis. I’ve upgraded the app that runs our office library to Rails 4, and started some preparatory work to migrate the authentication from GitHub to Google.

I’ve also been iterating the missions app and, thanks to Mark’s help, each mission is now printable as a poster. I’m hoping to share it with GDS folks next week.

And on Thursday afternoon, I went over to the Parliament to meet some of the digital team. I gave a demo of Maslow, our user needs tool, and answered some of their questions about GOV.UK. It was interesting to hear about the challenges they’ve faced. (And I got to have lunch on the terrace.)

Whoa. It’s been quite a busy week.