Weeknote 40: Yew trees

Writing weeknotes on a Sunday, again. I used to be better at doing these in the week and publishing them on Friday. It's unclear if it's because I've got less time or I just don't feel like it. Probably more the latter.

Anyway, this week I:

  • Continued building out what we're now calling the Service Explorer; a data collection and analysis 'tool' built in Airtable to automate the assessing of services using GOV.UK Frontend. Some specific things it can now do:
    • Get GOV.UK Frontend-specific info via our custom metrics including how they're using the service header, if they're using it, and if they're using the new type scale feature flag
    • Get info on service technology via WepPageTest's Wappalyzer integration
    • Get a service's recorded Axe violations
    • Automatically 'guess' a service's service name, which is more useful right now for the initial data import rather than a permanent feature IMO
  • Get all our historic data from the last month and change on services which we were getting via WPT's google sheets + google app script bulk tester into the service explorer with a bit of manual data cleaning
  • Helped with trying to document as we go instead of trying to squeeze out documentation at the end of the work like we've been doing previously, starting with defining our unique terms for the tool
  • Gave a scrappy, unplanned talk to the GDS Frontend Community on the file size stats work I did last cycle

Setting the (air)table

Sorry that jaunty title doesn't make any sense, the imagination isn't flowing today.

Anyway, I've found this service measurement work super rewarding and interesting. This was the dream behind the GitHub stats experiment that me and Brett (mostly Brett) built: a way to automatically get a list of GOV.UK Frontend services and extra information on them for analysis and measurement so that we could get hard data on services to fill the gaps our user research is trying to fill but can't because of the sheer scale of government and so that we don't get stuck in choice paralysis or evidence guilt. That's to say nothing of the x-govuk service list which that experiment was standing on the shoulders of. This angle of WPT and a platform like airtable to automate data-gathering feels like the best attempt yet. We need to do some dashboard-wrangling but this can give us so much interesting info and that same data over time. Who's ready for graphs?!

The missing piece in this was sample size, which I've sort of come to terms with. I remember I got very caught up with trying to get the biggest possible true list of services and do so programmatically rather than manually when I was doing the github stats work. My learning from that is firstly that it's kinda sorta impossible. The definition of 'GOV.UK service' has been stretched massively since the whole GOV.UK thing started and it's really difficult for a machine to differentiate between an open government service and someone's pet project that happens to be using GOV.UK Frontend (not a use case for AI don't talk to me about it).

Secondly, the thing that's loomed over any attempt to measure gov services at scale: not all services are created equal. With the deepest respect to all my digigov colleagues building their services, there's a gulf of difference between services that people need in order to go about their lives like the passport or prison services and a minister's short lived pet. I don't think that's exactly a red hot take because we've all worked on junk services, myself included. This is in part what the Top75 was all about. Being able to grade the 'importance' of services is the next frontier, in my opinion. How do you do that?

For now though, we've got some data to mess around with and the possibility to add more metrics.

Owen's cultural consumer guide

I ended up actually doing loads of social guff this week which was nice if a little tiring.

A lot of rich food for a start. I caught up with some mates at Texas Joe's in Bermondsey on Wednesday for some slow cooked meats. That Mutton and Cornbread are nothing to sneeze at. The chat was alright as well, I guess. It's also round the corner from my wife's office so I will be returning.

Speaking of my wife, we went to grab a slice and a drink at the 3 Colts in Bethnal Green. I feel like I've walked past this place loads when I lived round there and never went in. It's pretty solid. I keep waiting for a pizza spot to unseat my beloved Ace pizza at the Pemb and this comes close, but not quite. Still very good as London pizza goes. I appreciate that I can pick up the slice and it doesn't go flaccid. Neapolitan pizza sucks, don't at me.

Yesterday to work some of this scran off we went for a big hike up Box Hill with more mates. I haven't been here since I was a lad and I didn't appreciate then how pretty it was. Some really incredible old yew trees. What was a big surprise is after mincing back down the hill we stopped at Rykas cafe and had one of the very best smash burgers I've ever eaten. I didn't expect such high quality out of a biker's pit stop in the middle of Surrey. Maybe it was the post-hike talking.

Final thing worth mentioning is that I got around to Don't Tap The Glass. I loved Chromakopia last year and this feels like Tyler going the other way. He got all his feelings out on Chroma and now he wanted to make an album with a bunch of bops and it rocks. I prefer this to the last time he did this with Call Me if You Get Lost which I didn't really get which is nice. Sucka Free is my current 'Owen is working from home and having a little dance in the kitchen whilst me makes a coffee' track.