Week 12

I’ll start with a nod to last weekend, when I went along to National Hack the Government Day 2013. Working with Harry, Lily and Ed, we built Universirator, an app which takes Unistats data and shows you the best (and worst) places to study based on the average graduate salary for the course you’d like to take. We won the prize for Mark O'Neil’s favourite hack.

I’ve spent a lot of this week getting updates made to our overseas passports smart answer, and chasing up a few rate-change issues from last weekend.

Work to try and make smart answers easier to maintain - and some of the more complex calculators easier to use - has kicked off this week too. Jack and I spent a while sorting through a each smart answer and grouping them into categories: those which fit into a simple ‘choose your own adventure’ format; those which are complex calculators; and those which fit the void inbetween. Next week, we’ll start hacking on some new tools to make these better.

Last night, I went along to Teacamp London in Victoria, where I heard some really interesting discussions on women in digital, and ways in which to address equality across the tech community. Martin Belam has a good write-up of a handful of the talks.