Week 28

I started this week where last week left off. I’ve been taking my turn on the 2nd Line Support team, responding to alerts and running code deploys. I was also doing some work to make Frontend output logs in the JSON format so that it plays nicer with our Kibana instance. This was based on the work that Brad and Phil did last week.

On Wednesday, I came back to the GOV.UK Mainstream Team, and I’ve been helping get the Child Benefit Tax calculator ready for its second round of user testing, which is taking place early next week. I’ve been implementing some fixes to make the calculator more accessible, along with some new validation rules and a ton of copy changes.

Today, I’ve also been helping Henry in building a Chrome extension which will insert social media share links into GOV.UK content. It’s a new approach we’re trying out for user testing, which means we can experiment with ideas quicker without having to modify our app’s code. I’m looking forward to seeing both how the links perform, and how we could iterate this way of testing ideas in the future.

And finally, this week I hacked a bit on Departure Lounge, a very airport-inspired representation of the upcoming events in a Google Calendar. It’s been our release dashboard at GDS Towers for a while now, but I’ve decoupled it somewhat from our use case and I’ve documented the steps required to get it up and running.

Next week, I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the outcome of the user testing, going to see Bwani Junction, and our all-staff picnic.