Weeknote 42: one-third-life crisis

This week has been bananas. I think I've had something on basically every day, some of it work related. Tomorrow is gonna be the only day that I'm not doing anything besides settling into making pork shoulder for lunch. Looking forward to not being bothered.

This week:

• Finished building a rebrand adoption interface that we sent to the brand team. Some useful feedback and rejigging already. One senior stakeholder recommended we send this to the director of GOV.UK because they reckon they'll be really excited to see it and so that we get the direct credit for it (!!!!!). Got some chats to set up next week about the needs of folks in the brand and engagement team. Feeling validated about the work and excitement we've put into this.
• Implemented a neat little idea that my dev colleagues thought up, so full credit to them, to cross-reference features we're measuring with click data from GOV.UK's analytics. For example at time of writing roughly a third of services are using the rebrand, from our sample, but against that same sample roughly 3 quarters of clicks from GOV.UK are going to a rebranded service. Sort of vanity metrics but a good start in doing 'weighted' analysis rather than treating every service equally (which I'm sorry they're not all equally important).
• Helped Brett with data cleanup, getting rid of retired services, getting the right URL's for others and condensing services that use a common platform like MoJ Forms.
• Went to Bristol for a team away day
• Finally got back around to finishing of a L&D session I've got in the calendar next week to teach team members about GitHub's information architecture, which I've left a bit to the last minute. Oops!

Work holiday

We had a bloody good away day this week. I was looking on here and the last time we had an away day was Christmas which is bonkers. I remember we were gonna have one in July but we had to cancel it cause we were deep in brand work. The ideal is that we have one once a quarter so we are way overdue.

This one was focused on the GOV.UK programme getting a pretty decent spending review bid and how this team could use that cash to help meet the digital blueprint. The prompts were wrapped in that big bid and the team were encouraged to be ambitious and imaginative. Imagination might not be my strong suit but if there's anything I excel at it's describing the daft things I want to happen and why.

Generally I found it super energising. The formats for chat were really good and aimed at getting as many people as possible into the chats. Shout out to Trang for her idea of an 'open panel' format where there are multiple chairs at the front of a room and people can come and go to get involved in a discussion. I also got to pitch my pie in the sky idea for a 'service quality' programme in GDS that cuts across everything in order to upskill people working on the actual digital things and enable the digital things being built fast and well. Supplement that with some frank and thoughtful chats about (gen)AI and what guidance on AI would look like and mean.

I don't know if any of it will come to fruition but it's nice to not feel inhibited for a change. I feel like this team have been consistently ignored and misunderstood, sometimes having to really fight for our survival, so the prospect of getting any sort of buy in rocks.

PS: What is an 'AI pattern'? I don't know. My team doesn't know. Nobody in GDS seems to know, even though people in GDS and out are asking us for advice about it. Is it just 'guidance on using AI'? Maybe the word 'pattern' is the enemy here...

Out and about

The awy day was a big part of this but I had an uncharacteristically busy week. Mostly just seeing different groups of mates. We did a few social bits the night before the away day, including a visit to Chance & Counters where a few of us got into a game of Pandemic. Big up Romaric for pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat. One of the best plays I've ever seen.

It's always a bit of a challenge with these traveling away days to not feel like I'm on me' holidays and throw any sort of restraint out the window, which I've been burnt by before, but I think I kept it halfway sensible. Kept the diet reasonably normal.

On my phone

My special little project at the moment is getting off of Spotify which I currently use for podcasts and music. There are a number of reasons which aren't really for this weeknote but a simple one is that it just feels worse. I'm tired of Spotify injecting AI slop into my release radar. Enough please. I've moved all my podcasts over to AntennaPod which is a cracking app and open source project and am currently looking at Deezer for music.

This also coincides with me attempting to detox from social media after chatting to a few folks at the away day. Instagram and LinkedIn off my phone. Web client only if I absolutely need to get on them. I'm tired of the impulse to scroll whenever I'm watching the telly.

What this has led to is that I have become an RSS person. Call it my one-third-life crisis. Right now my feed is just a few blogs from mates and the news, plus all my poddies on anetenna. I will be asking friends to put RSS on their personal websites in the near future.