Notes and weeknotes from Anna Goss
Almost ten years ago, I read a blog post about the RAT: the Riskiest Assumption Test . My hazy recollection is that this was the origin of the RAT; certainly the post spread like wildfire, and I'd not come across it as a way of thinking before. When the post came out, I was working at Pivotal Labs, a best-in-class XP and lean product shop. Clients would come to us and pair with our teams of…
It's just rained. The sky's a kind of pinky grey blue. There's a rainbow, I'm out with the dog and I'm really hoping that Crystal Palace beat Manchester City this evening. (Note from the future: they did not.) I'm four weeks into a new role as deputy director in the Test, Learn & Grow (TLG) programme in Cabinet Office. We're working with ten places and local authorities on six missions - broadly…
My new favourite metaphor for ‘what the work looks like’. Always trying to make it feel like the coolest room in London. From Why Is This Interesting, on Plastic People : Plastic People was also early to CDJs, which collapsed the distance between production and actuality. DJs could bring tracks almost immediately after finishing them on a computer and hear them through a serious system at two in…
We’ve put FF Studio into liquidation . My partner’s PhD thesis is submitted, the culmination of six years of hard work. The sun’s finally come out again. No grand reflections but a post to mark what feels like a big fortnight in our very small corner of the world, with important things coming to a close and new things beginning. Trying to see the world with more lightness, and to finish the apple…
I’m still trying to close tabs. Here’s some links about complexity in system design. Me putting the link here isn’t me endorsing it. I’m just posting it and saving it in case it is useful for future me, or perhaps today you. Relatedly, it feels like Arc is dying its death now that it’s effectively been decommissioned by The Browser Company. I’m curious as to where they go with Dia, but I can’t say…
I’ve got a lot of open browser tabs from over the past two years. Arc deletes your open tabs at the start of the day, but you can still drag stuff to ‘pinned’ if you want to keep it, and every so often I drag a load of things up to pinned and then never look at them again. To think when I started using Arc I felt scorn for everyone still using Chrome with loads of tabs open. Anyway, I’m trying to…
We just closed FF Studio . While it’s fresh in my mind, I thought I’d write down some thoughts about the last three years, and about running a small studio that did mostly public sector or public sector adjacent work in 2025. For those unfamiliar: FF Studio was a small design and technology studio. I started it and ran it with Eliot Fineberg . At our busiest we turned over £900k in a year and had…
Five weeks of pretty much consistently 3 days a week at the gym except for one week where I only made it once. This is the consistency I dream of! I’m running GZCLP while I attempt to get some numbers back to where they used to be. the mix of high reps and low reps of the same exercise on different days seems to be serving me well: my bench press has never been so good. Or is it carrying around…
I have blogged since 2022 but elsewhere like everyone who has every written a blog post or weeknote, I convinced myself that the platform was the issue, not the...not writing. it didn’t take very long to write a script to export Tumblr posts to Markdown, or to create an Eleventy site. file under ‘things that would not have happened before LLMs’. nonetheless my position on ‘owned’ digital services…
I don't know if a term has ever been so ubiquitous, so quickly as " vibe coding ". Five months in and it's still all my LinkedIn feed is talking about. It's stuck, most likely, because it's describing a thing we all already knew was happening, we were all already doing it, but it put a name to it. ( All Fours got massive for arguably similar reasons . From The Guardian: "There’s a funny bit in All…
went for a beer with Alice and suggested I might write a weeknote when I got home we each had two pints of Neck Oil. it was £6.30 for one pint. I’m glad I don’t go to the pub three or four nights a week any more last night our next door neighbour said to me, “there’s a house round the corner, they’ve taken the whole roof off. shall we go round with the cargo bike and see if we can get some wood?”.…
noting as I look down the sidebar of iAWriter that Angus shaming me into writing week notes lasted three notes. it seems that shame isn’t a great motivator. for whatever reasons, the world has felt ridiculously heteronormative recently, whether in the films we’ve watched or the things going on around us. it’s a hard do-not-relate, and as someone who has arrogantly never particularly engaged with…
so many browser tabs. so many half started thoughts. so many “maybe I’ll be more productive when I’ve…..” moments. I think I could use a couple of days in an office. let’s not talk about work, hey? bought 5 more Hive thermostatic radiator valves; now when we try to boost the heating in one or both of our offices during the day, we can keep the rest of the house cool. gutted that our smart meter…
despite having taken three days off the week before last, I remain very much at the end of my tether. I know this because I spend a lot of time muttering stuff under my breath and swearing when very minor things go wrong. by Wednesday night I was texting pictures of the cheese in the fridge to the group chat after our Sainsbury’s order arrived. by Thursday morning we’d moved onto discussing bin…
Angus shamed me into writing again. what you saying, Chris , Hurrell ? we got a dog in December. she came over from a shelter in Bulgaria in a van with 19 of her other dog buddies, two months after her puppies all got adopted. from all the chats I’ve had since with other dog owners, we’ve lucked out: she’s calm, good with kids, doesn’t jump up at strangers, and is super loyal. every morning when…
back on this ‘self reflection’ bullshit. we’ve moved, to Brighton right next to the South Downs, so now I strip wallpaper for fun. having enough space for us each to have an office is amazing, walks on the South Downs every morning are amazing, the sea poking its head up from all angles is amazing. I haven’t really ventured into Brighton which I half wonder is a fear of going back to the past,…
thing about everyone caring about GOV.UK on the internet again this week: there’s no way to make everyone happy. it’s a public service, so everyone feels a bit of ownership. fair enough. I’m looking forward to seeing how accounts play out based on what we learn, and having some proper chats about it as we go along. moving somewhere bigger (…almost four times bigger) is making me mildly concerned…
shed mouse has got some nerve. first eating our Brexit spaghetti. and now it’s taken to eating the caps off bike chain lube (that’s two bottles lost to it now) and the straps of every single piece of bike luggage I own. humane or kill trap? both make me feel sick, but then, so does the rage I have for shed mouse, so. I was pretty dismayed by the comments on Gary Younge’s excellent piece in the FT…
cancelled an American Express card that I only got because I wanted some free lounge access. free for year 1, £140 for year 2 and every year after that, and when I got the £140 bill this month I was like “wuuuuut nooooooo”. anyway, the point is: never had a lovely ‘endings’ experience: accrued points transferred to another loyalty account, “obviously the account fee will be waived”, and a little…
the week before last, I didn’t want to write a weeknote. last week, I just didn’t make the time for it. sorry to my 25 week streak. we cleaned out / tided the shed. I’m simultaneously very happy about this and also a bit sad that “sorting out the shed” is no longer a thing to look forward to. questions remain outstanding over what I should do with one working and one broken Shimano 600 STI…
fell off my bike on the way back from the shops on Friday morning. clipped a bin and came off sideways on a route I’ve done probably 150-200 times. there are bruises, no skin was broken, I only cried ten hours later after C got home and was nice to me. arnica is helping. started doing the Running Clinic’s 5k programme last week. jumped straight into the end of week 6. so until Friday my mind was…
completely adore the Surly. cables are starting to stretch a bit already, but I’ll deal with that in a few weeks. only ridden it twice since the last weeknote - once with C on her way to work again, once today to go to the shops in Peckham - but I love it. can’t wait until it doesn’t feel slightly edgy to go out on a bike. we pre-ordered a Colomba from General Store to pick up this morning, and…
enjoyed the occasional chat this week about what’s “right” with regards to the acquisition of stuff. all kinds of stuff. food. other stuff. this article in the New York Times ends with the line “Sometimes a fleece is only a fleece. And sometimes it can be a creative rescue line, and a bet on the future.” but do I want all those warehouse workers and delivery drivers being out in the world or would…
another mad work week. worked through the weekend prototyping a new form which went live on GOV.UK today . Stephen was out for a few days earlier in the week so I covered him and pretended to be the head of design for GOV.UK. nothing broke, though that’s almost all credit to the brilliance of the design team who amongst them picked up on the businesses offering support work, switched focus to some…
well, what a mad week to join GOV.UK. the past five days been a combination of finding my place, figuring out GOV.UK, remembering how to deliver, not putting my back out, learning how to work remotely. and probably something else too. it feels like it’s been a very long week. as predicted, it has been great working with the design team. and everyone else! there’s been loads to get my head around…
Rebecca Solnit once again making the case for hope as a form of resistance . “There is one hummingbird on the power line outside the window of the room I’m writing this in, in the middle of San Francisco, and this work is worth it just for hummingbirds.” “We need to understand the worst-case scenarios and the suffering and loss happening now, so we know what we’re trying to prevent. But we need to…
just full of bad energy this week. didn’t want to write these at all. but there we go. one of the things I think about a lot around ‘leadership’ is kind of based on Paul Ford’s post about how irony doesn’t scale . essentially boiling down to, how do you provide 'air cover’ (urgh, military analogies) for people around you - and a lot of the time, I reckon, it’s just about keeping your mouth shut…
I’ve had two nightmares about getting on planes. hugely excited to stay grounded for at least another week after working out last Friday that I’ve been in flight for over 60 hours in the past month. that’s before hanging around in airports or getting to them. the flygskam is strong. things that I have read and enjoyed this week include ’ Garbage Language / why do corporations speak the way they…
this is another weeknote written from an airport. Zagreb airport is excellent. stayed in both a 4* and a 3* hotel this week. the 4* hotel had a pool, but also my room was a bit dark, 25 degrees and couldn’t be made cooler, and confusing shower controls. the 3* hotel did not have a pool or a spa, but did have good lighting and daylight, was only 21 degrees aka a temperature you can sleep in, and…
went on holiday to Sri Lanka. we met some elephants and saw loads of birds (the type with feathers). for the first time ever I took the exact right number of books on holiday. I was three quarters through the last one as the plane landed. finished it yesterday on the way to work. pretty sure this is the first time anyone in the world has achieved this feat. one of the things I read was ‘Ceylon’ by…
turns out gallivanting round London when you’re still a bit jetlagged is actually exhausting. went to Daunt Books for an event with Hisham Matar on Wednesday night. the first time I went to Daunt I was a child and it was my schoolfriend’s mum’s book launch (yes, she worked for the BBC, yes, I grew up in north London). I remember gawping at the gallery and thinking I was in some kind of bookshop…
skipped last week. wrote something. didn’t publish it. Friday was busy. have you done your tax return? more travelling this week. have a feeling I’m not meant to write about where I was. how shady is that? good trip though. met lots of nice people. ate a lot of nice food. had some great feedback at the end of the week. as someone who thrives off appreciation, that’ll keep me going for a week or…
I had no idea whether to write a weeknote last Friday or not because I’d already posted two that week. had a great dream on Saturday night that, one way or another, Max and I ended up hiring a Zipcar and driving Taylor Swift to her gig in Glasgow. the best part was probably the bit where I dreamt about how we’d taken the Zipcar for longer than we’d expected, but the limit for Flex rentals is £72 /…
Philip Pullman was always better than JK Rowling anyway more on transactions, aka the two things I’d forgotten when I wrote about library fees last week: at With Associates, we ate lunch with each other quite often. Mathew had built the table to accommodate that. one person would say “Turkish?” and usually one or two people would go out to get lunch for the others. which meant we all owed each…
what was last Friday? should I write as if it was then or as if it’s now? the people who write weeknotes during the Christmas holidays are my people. well done everyone. went to see my mum and dad pre-Christmas, then from there to Italy to see C’s dad. Christmas day was 9 Italian adults and 4 Italian children and me. I tried my hardest to keep up, but I was glad to be sent to the sofa for a little…
we had a very gentle design team meeting this morning, not least because it was the design team Christmas party last night. passing a panettone around in a circle the morning after the night before felt like about the right level for me today. nothing but love for Hector Bellerin speaking his mind . some people think footballers shouldn’t have opinions on politics. me, I’m with Tim Stillman .…
Jack tweeted earlier in the week about feeling at a bit of a dead end, and how do you find a mentor etc etc. I’ve definitely felt similarly in recent months: something about getting to a certain level of seniority has meant fewer people looking out for me, and I’ve found myself feeling a bit jealous of the people I line manage or mentor. I want an hour to talk about my work and where I’m going! so…
I asked about sci fi on Twitter earlier in the week. there were so many replies that now I have absolutely no idea of where to start, except for starting with the books that Will brought in for me the very next day. actions speak louder than words IN ACTION! when I was at Co-op I wrote an intro to a story of a food store in 2030 (yes, the most boring story ever) to try to get across how technology…
had my last Italian lesson before my teacher goes and has a baby and takes a bit of time off. unprompted, she told me that I am her best student. well maybe tied with someone else but they do loads of homework. obviously I was delighted, and then I suddenly worried that I should be doing way more Italian homework than I am. story of my life. when the news broke about Spurs firing Poch and…
I’m in Manchester today helping another department out with recruitment. it’s nice learning about what other bits of government are doing. I also figured I could take the afternoon off as holiday to see some of my mates from the Co-op. an unforseen bonus of this trip though is that I could swap some Top Quality Virgin Trains Bants with Andrew . a year of sharing a 200 mile commute really sets up a…
at one point this week I had a bit of a breakdown which involved sentences like “I don’t want to be responsible anymore!”. maybe it’s something to do with how much time I’ve spent on the expenses system. no, in reality, I am rational and responsible 94% of the time and I am slowly learning how to be selfish. it’s been tumultuous! no one ever told me that 32 is like 13, but older. is this a thing?…
DOTI Fest was great. not least giving myself permission to go to things that I’m interested in. for a very short period of time, I was going to skip the design x climate crisis workshop, because I had a bunch of office-work to do and I thought, maybe I should just go and do that. then I thought, hey now, why are you preventing yourself from being interested in a thing you’re interested in? have to…
obviously I’m always banging on about pensions in terms of civil service benefits but do we mention on Civil Service Jobs that the Cabinet Office VPN allows you to watch iPlayer when abroad? we do not. is that an open goal missed? it is. Lauren Currie mentioned You’re Doing Great in her opening talk of the Service Design Fringe Festival. apparently it’s an example of service designers levelling…
I started the week by emailing a whopping three people on my team about my priorities for the week. That helped me look at my diary and move or cancel things that didn’t help me meet those priorities. then tonight I looked through them and sent a follow up with green ticks or sad face emoji. you’ll be pleased to know that all my P1s were met (as of 5pm tonight), and I got four sets of bonus…
Hurrell ’s writing weeknotes and they’re so damn good that I thought I’d try too. got back from Buenos Aires on Monday morning. I didn’t sleep very well on the plane and after an hour’s nap, left the house at about 11am and tried to spend the rest of the day outdoors / not asleep on the sofa. gentle breast stroke = great for exhaustion / jetlag, but honestly, go before 3.30 because you wanna be…
Civil Service (CS) Pensions are quite complicated. I tried to figure them out, made a presentation which I shared with the GDS design team, and made a spreadsheet to work out if I'll be rich when I'm old. I've been told that other people would find all this useful, so here goes nothing. There are lots of numbers and options thrown around with the CS Pension scheme. When I did a bit of digging, all…