Weeknotes  

Monday 21 Nov - Sunday 27 Nov 2022

Things I did

• Created a ‘Service status’ page for the planning data service.

  The team have been doing some rather hefty infrastructure refactoring under the hood to be able to handle our strategy of increasing the number of data providers and datasets over time.

  Due to what must be quite a tricky Domain Name System (DNS) balancing act between gov.uk and services like ours. We experienced more downtime for some users than we anticipated.

• Proposed a pattern to the GOV.UK Design System.

  It occurred to me ‘service status’ was a pattern applicable to many services on gov.uk. I looked and there wasn’t an existing proposal in backlog. So I added one: ‘Service status’ pattern #266.

• Continued to help develop the Department for Levelling Up ‘User Centred Community’. We had a productive meeting with MadeTech who it turns out have just began a separate piece of work around communities of practice within the department.

  

• Worked with Lawrence (our very talented engineer) to configure a separate instance of Upptime which will monitor our systems and generate a separate status page, powered entirely by GitHub.

  This was in addition to the service status page on planning.data.gov.uk. We felt this was needed by the team and could be valuable in the event of a total service failure.

• Added a ATOM feed so you can subscribe to these weeknotes. Read more ‘About Feeds’.

  The feed URL is:

  https://paulsmith.site/weeknotes/feed.xml

• Started regularly using Mastodon. Find me here: https://mastodon.me.uk/@paulmsmith

Links I clicked

• The beginning and the end of Twitter - Giles talks about his experience of twitter. From finding the Yay in Twitter back in 2006 through to the rich bloke turning up.
• About Feeds - An explainer site for ‘web feeds’ which you can use to subscribe to websites and get all the latest content in one place.
• ooh.directory - There is something lovely about this site. It reminds me of the early days of the web before the search-bots and algorithms were developed. “A place to find blogs that interest you.”
• Me, But online - A collection of minimalist, original personal websites with great typography.

Food I munched

• Cinnamon Toast Crunch “Cinnadust” and honey on Jason’s Sourdough Ciabattin is the most epic Sunday breakfast toast ever.

  

Approaching a scheduled stop

This week was a four day week for me. So is next week. I know lots of people do this but I thought I’d write again why it is important for me.

In software development, a ‘breakpoint’ is an intentional stopping or pausing place in a program, put in place for debugging purposes.

More generally, a breakpoint is a means of acquiring knowledge about a program during its execution, which I think is a good analogy for what I do.

People say when you take some time off you should forget about work but I’m deliberately using the breakpoint analogy.

Why? because I will only be able to forget about work if I’ve sat down, thought about (debugged) what’s been happening and arrived at a way to move forward when I return to work.

I highly recommend it. As well as writing weeknotes, which has massively helped me process what’s been swirling around my head.

See you next week. 👋