Week 31

I’m going to combine the last two weeks together, as I’ve been away on holiday.

I started last week with a fleeting visit to Campus Party at the O2 Arena in Greenwich. I was surprised at the enormous scale of the event: there were so many activities taking place. I also enjoyed a demo of Appmaker from the folks at Mozilla, who were actually hacking on the project on the top floor of one of the concert venues.

I also attended dConstruct last week. It was my first visit to Brighton. The majority of the talks were of a particularly high standard - particularly Dan Williams’ talk on the unexpected uses of technology with a focus on surveillance. I also found Brighton to be quite a charming seaside town, despite the weather.

At the start of this week, I talked to Barclaycard around some of the specifics of the SmartPay migration for some of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s services on GOV.UK, and we now have enough information to begin work on some of the stories for this. I’ve also been involved in data modelling discussions for the upcoming Needs Management & Performance Reporting project - the first stage of which we’ve dubbed ‘Maslow’. More on this to come soon.

And finally, I spent most of this week away on holiday. I visited Phantasialand in Germany, followed by Toverland and Efteling in The Netherlands. I might write a bit more about this in another piece.