In manufacturing, Lean thinking revolutionised how products were built by relentlessly eliminating waste. Whilst the "software factory" analogy isn't perfect, the core Lean principle of eliminating waste underpins modern software delivery, from Agile and DevOps to Continuous Delivery and Platform Engineering.
A guide to building a highly customisable, lightweight, secure, and performant static site using MkDocs, NGINX and Docker.
I'm rolling two releases together into this blog, since I wanted to get these features out sooner. I still think blogging is important way to commutate, but it was starting to become a blocking task, with some features done and ready to release but waiting for an associated blog post to be written. In future I'm taking the approach of releasing features more regularly and blogging about them when it reaches a significant amount of change.
2020 was a difficult year for many people in previously unimaginable ways. 2021 doesn't immediately appear to be an improvement for most people, although there is hope on the horizon, and maybe by this time next year we might be experiencing at least a moderate improvement.
One of my favourite stickers on my laptop is Simon Wilson's "Always be in beta" design. It serves as a reminder that, generally speaking, services are never finished and that continual gradual improvement is the best approach to take. I'm sure this service will be no different.
It's been a long time since the previous release of Mash Time Tracker in August 2019; life, work and free time have been the enemies of side project progress! I've had a number of features "parked" for a while, stuck behind other parts I had started working on and not finished. I've decided to unblock them to get incremental improvements out sooner rather than wait for the bigger features to be ready. I'll try and focus on smaller and more frequent releases in future.
Since introducing Mash Time Tracker last month there have been two releases to production. The first was a large scale refactoring of the app, to improve the structure of the code and make it easier to add new features in future. The second release is what I want to share today; a new feature!
One of my first jobs in software development after leaving university was to rewrite a corporate time management system. So it seems ironic that after 12 years of experience I find myself coming right back to where I started.
Mash Health is a digital public service that enables users to find UK healthcare providers. It uses the data.gov.uk API to access healthcare information for a variety of service types, including hospitals, GP surgeries, pharmacies, clinics and social care.
Mash Petitions is a digital public service that enables users to explore UK parliament petitions. It builds upon the governments' e-petitions platform, exposes more detailed information and combines it with other open public data to enable interesting analysis and insight.