Week 26

A very last-minute instalment of week notes this week.

On Monday, I finished the improvements to related links, and I wrote a blog post about them for the Inside GOV.UK blog, which got published on Wednesday after I deployed the changes.

With the Mainstream team, I went to Bletchley Park on Tuesday, the home of the British codebreakers during the war. It was fascinating - it’s my second visit after the Software Craftsmanship event last year - and it was also a great opportunity to get a team photo (thanks Roo!). I’ve uploaded my photos to Flickr.

For the remainder of this week, I’ve been doing a couple of spikes. The first spike was to look into Barclaycard’s SmartPay platform, investigating how we could migrate the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s transactional services app to use it. The second spike, around the Fact API, was to explore the different data types we’d like to represent and make some suggestions. An already-compiled list of the most common facts and figures across GOV.UK was really helpful here.

Next week, I’m timetabled in for the 2nd Line Support rota at GDS, and I’m also going up to Birmingham to speak at this year’s Young Rewired State. I’m quite excited :)