Weeknotes 9 18 May 2014 This was a great week. At the start of this week we released the new version of site search for GOV.UK. This gets rid of the old tabbed interface, and introduces our first "facet" for refining searches. There have been a few small teething troubles, but mostly it's performed as we hoped; it's working at least as well as the old interface, but is a much more standard search…
Weeknotes 8 12 May 2014 This week was particularly short, containing a bank holiday and a day of holiday. It was also somewhat different from normal, since I've been doing my first rotation on "second line" support. This mainly means helping people with deploying stuff, and monitoring the site to ensure nothing's broken. I've learnt a fair bit more about how the site is set up, and various awkward…
Weeknotes 6 and 7 5 May 2014 Two weeks worth of weeknotes today again, after a couple of very productive weeks. The restructure to form a "search and browse" team has been a great success so far, with lots of progress being made and a first release of a new search interface expected this week. Having a team with a clear objective, and sprint goals set such that we're all working together on the…
Weeknotes 5 20 April 2014 Last week was a bit different, because I spent the majority of it at a conference on Information Retrieval. This was [ECIR 2014](http://ecir2014.org) which is a well established academic conference. It was great to catch up with the research that's been going on, and also with the researchers themselves: I've been to several ECIR conferences over the years, and first met…
Weeknotes 3 and 4 13 April 2014 I missed writing up week notes last week due to a nasty bit of flu, so I'm combining notes for weeks 3 and 4 together; I only managed to get about a week's worth of work time in that period anyway. The main focus of the past couple of weeks has been working on a stripped-down search interface, which gets rid of the separate tabs and instead just returns a single…
Weeknotes 2 30 March 2014 This week started with some interesting follow-up chats about ScaleSummit. I learnt a lot of things at ScaleSummit, but many of them were from colleagues at GDS. I'd like more of this kind of thing to happen within GDS, and as part of that I'm hoping to give an internal talk or seminar about building search systems, and in particular doing so using Elasticsearch. It's…
Weeknotes 1 23 March 2014 Those following along closely will be aware that I started working at the Government Digital Service a little over a month ago. My current task is to improve the site search on [GOV.UK](http://www.gov.uk/). One of the great things about working here is the openness; wherever possible, we publically document what's going on. A nice example of this is my colleague Jordan…
Think of teams as multipliers 14 March 2014 I was recently asked by a large company to give a reference for an ex-colleague of mine. This consisted of them asking me to answer 10 questions. Frankly, I’ll be surprised if they get much useful information from most such requests, but one question jumped out at me as being a symptom of a bad way of thinking about how teams of people work: “What kept…
SSH authentication with Mosh 8 May 2013 I’ve been using Mosh for a while to work on remote development virtual machines. I do a lot of work on the train while commuting, and being able to have a persistent session which I can access wherever I am is great. The reduced latency and notifications of unsent content that mosh provides are also very useful features. The only significant downside has…
Facebook Confidential Information Acknowledgement 23 April 2013 Take a look at the linked NDA (or as they call it “Confidential Information Acknowledgement”) from Facebook: UK_CIA.pdf In particular, note the following phrases: “we consider any information you learn while you’re here, to be our confidential information.” “you will not use any confidential information you learn while you’re here for…