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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
3 November 2013. 1 Comment
The last few weeks have involved lots of spinning plates. Two weeks ago GOV.UK reached one year old. We celebrated in the traditional way with blogs, cake and beer. Building out the new DVLA cloud infrastructure is ongoing. The View driving record team has started and completed the first stories focussed on Identity Assurance. There […]
17 October 2013. 1 Comment
A year ago today two of the government’s biggest websites, Directgov and Business Link, were switched off and GOV.UK became the official site for information and services. The last 12 months have flown by. It’s interesting to see how much the site has changed over the year as it continues to develop. It’s now the […]
13 October 2013
The last couple of weeks have been dominated by one topic – infrastructure. As mentioned in my previous week notes, we’ve been designing and building out the production infrastructure for the View Driving Record service at DVLA. Lots of effort has gone into talking to suppliers, designing what we need and spinning it all up. […]
23 September 2013. 4 Comments
I’ve neglected my week notes for a little while so here is a condensed update covering week 16 to 21. Part of the reason for the lack of notes is that I took a couple of weeks off towards the end of August. I tried to avoid using my computer during these weeks and completely […]
12 August 2013
It’s been another busy few weeks. Our big focus over these few weeks has been making sure absolutely everything we have to do before our public beta is included in our backlog. We’ve spent quite a bit of time with the dev team and lots of people at DVLA teasing out missing stories, converting ‘documents’ […]