Weeknote 41: Impromptu nap

Hello. I was just in the middle of watching An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn (which rocks btw) when my wife said she needed an impromptu nap. I'm writing this whilst she's dozing off.

Let's talk work:

  • Continued fiddling with airtable's interface builder. I've got a pretty clear picture of the possibilities and limitations. The next thing is to have data I want to extract in mind
  • Also messed around with data analysis in the same vein. Super interesting to really properly see a massive chunk of the govuk ecosystem like this. Some interesting insights about service lifecycle and also some of the frankly bonkers stuff people have done with their services
  • Did some more data cleaning. Our list of services now all have associated departments and proper service names. A big thanks to the x-govuk service list whose data we nicked and mapped onto our service list, saving us a lot of time with manual checking
  • Started compiling a must/should/could list for the rest of the cycle on what to do with airtable in the immediate to give us some boundaries for the last week before reflection week
  • Drafted rough docs for the tool to give our tech writer some raw material to work with
  • Made a little showing at the GDS frontend community meeting again, extolling the virtues of CLoudflare Pages Workers and how we've set up our Percy tests. It's nice to be more present in the community after ignoring it for a little while

State of the big website

Whilst we were doing data cleaning and messing around this week, we started picking up some interesting tidbits about the govuk ecosystem at large. Just me and this little squad knowing this stuff is more than we've had previously and it's so valuable being aware of the state of things in the first place.

Something I found interesting was the lifecycle of services. A number of services 'no longer exist' in that their domains redirect to gov.uk, usually a start page or the start of a step by step journey. A common pattern I saw was a service with a name that was a broad topic like 'juggling.service.gov.uk' might redirect to a section on gov.uk itself, but link out to the domain when a user needs to interact with the topic eg: 'juggling.service.gov.uk/apply-for-license'.

The services themselves have been transplanted to almost completely or partly to gov.uk, using it's functionality as an information website. That's great! Economic service architecture! It does prompt the question of how many separate-domain services there actually need to be, which itself opens up the question: how many of these services actually need to exist in the first place. That question being answered would certainly make my team's lives easier.

The other thing I noticed was that the quality of services was... mixed. I'm not here to roast anyone. The picture I have of what it's like building services in departments is not a positive one and quality doesn't survive in shitty, high pressure environments. Having said that... the number of services that we linking to gov.uk's accessibility statement and cookies page was pretty appalling. One service I won't name replaced their logo with the brand refresh logo but didn't apply the brand refresh itself. C'mon folks...

Both of these tell a story. Being able to demonstrate levels of quality across services is powerful. There's a perception among tech leaders in gov digital that the govuk ecosystem is 'solved' and services are good now. Yeah, some of them are very good, namely the ones that are properly funded and managed. However this quantifies that we maybe need to invest a little more in making sure services new and old stay good. That manifests in us trying to tighten up our product and more funding at the org level being put towards things beyond us like the service manual.

Mangas and Metroid-brainias

This is the non-work/cultural review bit of the weeknote and I have 2 things. Easy.

Firstly I'm still trying to beat Blue Prince. It's bloody hard. I now know what I need to do to open the antechamber and have done it a few times but then gotten unlucky with getting to the room itself. That's to say nothing of the other puzzles I've already started noticing (I've cracked the 2 pictures in each room I just don't know what to do with it yet). I'm slowly running out of steam on it, although I suspect it'll only take me getting to the antechamber to get my interest back up. It's a grand little game that's not so little at all.

Secondly I've gotten impatient waiting for the second season and have been reading Delicious in Dungeon where the anime leaves off. Oh man it's so great. Towards the end it starts to veer off of just food and gets in what it means to have ambition and dreams and hopes and interests. It's a super introspective manga with what I read as a really positive and nuanced message. Also the secret final bad guy is really cool and scary.