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Week 182

What’s short, somewhat patchy, and even later than last week? Yes, it’s the weeknotes!

This week, a lot of the effort on gov.uk has gone on improving the specialist guidance formats. This included ensuring each section of guidance has its own link, allowing searching of just specialist content and general cleaning up of the look, feel and behaviour. We’ve also improved video embedding, and fixed our continuous integration server to work harder. Many of these changes may seem small, but when you’re building part of a large project like gov.uk, there are often extra things that need to be considered. There are many different projects (maybe too many) that all need to work together, and making a small change can touch several of them, potentially breaking other unrelated areas of the site. Adding a simple filter to the search, for example, touched 6 different projects. That’s almost definitely too many, and something we’ll try and improve.

We haven’t had as much time this week as we might like to do non-gov.uk related stuff. James A only returned from the Americas on Friday afternoon, Chris has been flat hunting, and James M has been going through the hassle of buying a house. But even in weeks like this, we still like to make progress on stuff.

One thing we’ve tried to do is get some feedback on heylist from people who used it during the Scottish ruby conference. When the results have been compiled, we’ll get back to you.

James M has also been doing more thinking about how to solve mocha’s problems integrating with different test frameworks like minitest. Looking at issues like this one gives some idea how much hidden hard work goes into solving problems like these. Writing a mocking framework is hard, but keeping one working as test frameworks come and go is an even more difficult challenge.

Finally Chris (with some remote help from James A) showed printer to AND publishing for a potential project, and I spent some time continuing to write a mustache library in clojure. Hopefully more new about both of those soon.

That’s all for this week. Apologies for the lateness and brevity (though the latter may be something of a blessing). Until next time.

Tom

This week’s notes were driven down the M4 Olympic Games Lane by the words Olympic, Paralympic, London, Summer, 2012, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and the phrases Citius Altius Fortius and Faster Higher Stronger.