Week 63

After the bank holiday weekend, we went straight into our retrospective and sprint planning on Tuesday. The main themes around this sprint are getting unified search live, and building a tool to manage ‘best bets’ for particular search queries.

I’ve been picking up some of the final pieces of work needed before unified search can go live. I picked up a branch that Richard started, to weight search results by their popularity. Popularity weighting seems to work really well and should noticeably improve the quality of search results. I’ve also added the “report a problem” form to the search results page to help us get feedback on particular searches.

Gemma from the Ministry of Justice’s Digital Services team came to visit GDS on Tuesday to find out about how we run show-and-tell. I answered some of her questions about how we communicate that it’s happening, how we run it on-the-day and how we keep people to time. On Thursday, Manuel Mateo visited GDS from the European Commission so Alice and I spent a while talking with him about GOV.UK and GDS.

I’ve spruced up the Code Week blog this week, so that it uses the same design as the main website. Over the next couple of months, there’ll start to be more activity around this year’s Code Week.