Week 23

I’ve spent most of this week continuing work on simple smart answers in Publisher. It’s taken a little bit longer than anticipated because I encountered a heap of issues with both the nested_form gem and Mongoid - the latter being a bug which causes a MongoDB error when you try to update documents which are embedded more than one level deep. As an interim fix, we’re no longer embedding nodes inside the smart answers - instead using an old-school relation. If all goes well, the MVP should be ready to preview on Monday.

We had a follow-up retrospective to the search project at the start of the week. After the first retrospective, all our comments were added to a Trello list and sorted into a few common themes, and we met to discuss each in a bit more detail. The aim is to draw up a list of recommendations for projects of a similar nature in the future.

James gave a great tech talk this afternoon on the architecture of GOV.UK, and a bit of a primer to those on the dev team who haven’t yet become familiar with the ins and outs of the platform. It was also a good refresh for those of us who haven’t worked with particular apps or libraries for quite a while.

And finally, this week it was great to be able to give fellow young advisor Alja a tour around GDS (and a sneak peek at show-and-tell) whilst she’s visiting London.

PSA: There won’t be week notes for the next fortnight as I’m off on holiday. Normal service resumes soon.