Week 25

I started the week by carrying on with the story to separate related items on GOV.UK content into multiple groups, based on the section which the link is in. I ran into a few gotchas with travel advice, as we already send custom section titles and categories to Slimmer for travel advice editions. It’s all ready to go now, though, so it should head to production early next week.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I went along to a few sessions of MongoDB training along with some other members of the development team. Whilst I’ve been using Mongo for a while now, I found it useful to learn a bit more about the internals, and the chance to experiment with) replica sets.

And today I’ve been helping to run a ‘digital learning day’ for members of the Technology in Business Fast Stream. Along with David, Nick, Tom and Amy, we ran some hands-on sessions teaching a bit of code and design to those who are going to be leading up digital projects of the future in the civil service. For the session on server-side languages, I built an example web app to query the GOV.UK Search API using Node.js - the code is on GitHub. It was also a bit of a learning day for us, as we’d like to run these on a semi-regular basis in future, and we got some really good feedback in our 'retrospective’ session that will help us out.