Archive for 2014

Keeping motivated

9 September 2014. 1 Comment

When you’re deep in the day to day detail of projects, it’s quite easy to lose sight of the big picture. If you’re making lots of small, incremental changes, you can quickly forget what things were like when you started. I’m currently taking a couple of weeks away from my DVLA projects, partly because it’s […]

Week notes #49

7 April 2014

View driving record – lots of my focus over the past few weeks has been assisting this team to get to their public beta. It’s been a bit of a testing-fest with load, penetration and data quality testing going on. As the data from the driving records goes though a pretty complicated process to get […]

Week notes #45

10 March 2014

I started off the fortnight with 4 days in sunny Newcastle doing interviews for HMRC’s new digital centre. It’s always interesting sitting on the other side of an interview table, but these were somewhat unusual as we held them in hotel rooms. Luckily the hotel had replaced the beds with tables otherwise it could have […]

Week notes #43

24 February 2014

Vehicle tax & SORN – the team spent last week tidying things up and running tests with DVLA staff. They then launched the public beta on Thursday last week. Early counts suggest that nearly 5,000 people have taxed/SORNd their cars over the first few days using the beta. The team are now looking at the […]

Simpler, clear and faster car tax online

20 February 2014. 1 Comment

This afternoon, one of the projects I’ve been working on in Swansea launched into public beta. For the past 3 months, I’ve been working with a small team at the DVLA to look at how we can make the process of buying tax for your car online simpler. Taxing a car online isn’t exactly new […]

Week notes #41

10 February 2014

Quite clearly I didn’t manage to keep up with my intention to publish my week notes regularly. As things became a little crazy before Christmas, these always ended up at the bottom of my prioritised list. I’m going to give them another go, but they’ll probably be shorter, but hopefully still interesting. So, recently… Vehicle […]