#031

I reviewed and deployed a change to redirect the old whitehall consultations finder to a new one built in finder-frontend. The statistics finder will hopefully be done soon too. Moving functionality from whitehall into other apps lets us reduce complexity in whitehall itself, and centralise related features (like all search things being in finder-frontend), which makes it much easier to have consistent behaviour for similar things across GOV.UK.

I continued cleaning up the old elasticsearch 2 stuff:

• Destroying 3 VMs in our integration environment and shutting down 6 each in our production and staging environments.
• Removing all of the code for elasticsearch 2 and the old search app from our puppet.
• Fiddling around with GitHub repositories.
• Ensuring everything refers to the new search app, rather than the old one (which we’d aliased to refer to the new one).

I seem to delete a lot of code.

I did some thinking about switching the GOV.UK continuous integration to Concourse, which in principle a few of us are working on this quarter in our spare time. Nothing has been said or done about that in a few weeks, so I might send an email around to those involved and see if (a) they still want to be involved and (b) what people want to do, and what time they can put in. Now that we’ve all had a couple of weeks on our new teams, hopefully everyone will have a better idea of when they can work on things.

My line manager asked me if I would be open to be becoming a line manager, I said yes, and the next morning HR emailed me to say I’d be the line manager for someone starting in a few weeks. They don’t wait around.

I made a new layout for this site. It’s suspiciously similar to one of the entries in this week’s link roundup.

I read Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, which I last read some years ago. It’s primarily aimed at people managing a whole team, so there’s not much which is directly applicable to my role, but it’s still full of good advice and interesting anecdotes.

I started reading Void Star, but I’m not far enough through to really have an opinion yet.

The rewrite of BookDB with Elixir and Vue.js is going well. It’s nice to see how simple implementing filtering and sorting a table is with Vue, as that’s something I’ve wanted for a while. I think probably the next step is to embed the initial list of books in the page, rather than making an ajax request immediately after page load, and also supporting filtering on a field by the URL (eg, https://www.barrucadu.co.uk/bookdb/location/London).

My Concourse CI on NixOS memo made it to this instalment of NixOS Weekly.

I played around GOV.UK content data using Gephi and wrote Mapping GOV.UK to share some of the fancier graphs.