Week 897

Week beginning Monday 23 March.

It was a slow start to the week for me as I was off sick on Monday after waking up full of cold. I’m still not 100% but have got progressively better throughout the week.

Yesterday was our final week on the GOV.UK publishing project that we started back in week 886 so we’ve been busy wrapping everything up and handing over. We’ve made all the code we generated public, tidied up various documents and presented our work to various groups of people. I think we’ve left it all in a good position should it be continued in future.

The demos/prototypes we built are:

• National applicability experiment
• Document clustering experiment
• Topic taxonomy suggestions - static pages
• Topic taxonomy suggestions - Rails app

As part of tidying things up I did some refactoring of the Rakefile in the national applicability experiment which I found quite satisfying.

I’m proud of what we managed to do given the relatively short timescales and the very open ended nature of the problem space. And I’ve enjoyed learning more about “AI” and some of the machine learning techniques that underpin it.

We’re very grateful to dxw for getting us involved and always enjoy working with both dxw and GDS.

We’ve now got a week off client work before starting our next project in early April. We’ll hopefully be able to write more about that over the coming weeks.

In office news, both Chris and I have moved office. Chris has moved to an office downstairs in the Space4 building and I’ve moved to an office not too far from home. I’ve spent just over 3 years in a windowless office so moving to an office with a window is a bit of a game-changer!

That’s all for now.

Until next time.

– Chris