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.
I decided to do something about my weight and perceived body image. But it wasn't really about that. This is how I learned to stop worrying and love to run.
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.
As a part of my day job I create prototypes for services on GOV.UK. We use these as one of the ways to research and learn more about the needs users have of government. It's a very effective and fast paced way to get a lot of vital feedback throughout the service lifecycle and use it to iterate quickly and frequently.
I've been very lucky to have worked alongside some hugely talented people from the Government Digital Service on the Land Registry Concept and Alpha projects. Although I was experienced in working with the Scrum framework before this, I have come to better appreciate what it means to be a truly agile team.