It has been another busy week mainly still working on the [redacted] project which meant a trip to London on the 0700 from Bristol Parkway Monday morning. This train and the Tube were unnervingly quiet – I guess in the post-Covid, hybrid working world people don’t ‘do’ Mondays!

The [redacted] project remains challenging but some of the fog is starting to lift and I have to say the work of the designer involved has been top tier and the devs have also been brilliant – thoughtful but also moving really quickly. It has been impressive all round.

As an aside, that was my seventh work trip to London in the eight weeks in this role – which has been a bit unexpected but reasonably painless. It has been nice to see people face to face a bit, I like the London office more now I know where things are and have a go to seat and the combination of Uber (to get to the station), Realtime Trains to scout the carriages (and warn me if it is going to be half a train), SeatFrog and The Trainline has made these trips a great deal smoother than the old days.

I did get to the Bristol office for the first time this week. That was also a pretty smooth experience – the location right next to Temple Meads station works well for me, there are some nice lunch spots nearby and it was great to finally meet a few people in person based there that I have ‘social media’ known for years. The office is like a reverse TARDIS though – smaller on the inside! The lifts in particular are tiny – in days gone by I might not have been able to cope at all with them.

Christine Bellamy (the CEO of GDS) was in the office so there was a little lunchtime show and tell type thing. There were some interesting presentations of work happening by teams with a strong Bristol presence (very One Login -y) and I enjoyed learning a bit more about what is happening elsewhere in GDS (the GOVUK corner is big enough to keep track off but there is a lot happening in other wings of the org.)

There was another DSIT/Digital Centre session – this time with guest star Jeni Tennison – which shed more light on the aims and ambitions of that initiative. What I have heard so far and the growing commitment to openness has me feeling pretty hopeful.

There have been a few other things this week that fall into the [redacted] bucket for operational or stakeholder reasons. Being in GOVUK does put me in the centre of a lot of xGov things and it is getting a bit harder to be as open as I am comfortable being. I might copy Terence and write some posts for publishing after the statute of limitations has passed 😂

What else? We opened Product for the People 06 for bookings on Tuesday and there are just 5 tickets left at the time of writing. The unconference will be in Bristol on the 28th November – hopefully with a couple of exciting guest speakers!

I wrote a little bit about my odd career aspirations and also over on Bluesky I recommended some comics.

This time next week I will be boarding my flight to JFK for a week in New York. I’ve got some fun things lined up including a day at the New York Comic Con, tickets to the 3×3 half court basketball finals in Brooklyn, a tour of Yankee stadium and the Futura 2000 exhibition at the Bronx Museum. As well as my usual stops in Bushwick and the Lower East Side to update my photos of the graffiti. I’m staying in the heart of Williamsburg so I am expecting hipster bars to feature heavily as well.

Right that’ll do. Take care out there folks.