I've had another article published on the GDS blog - Rebuilding the scroll tracker on GOV.UK. This one's been a while in the making.
It started as a bit of work to add some scroll tracking, which led to the creation of a new scroll tracker, then a show and tell to my team, the same talk at the GOV.UK Technologists fortnightly, then again at the GDS wide 'Show the Thing'. That last one didn't go super smoothly as during the demo my internet collapsed (the perils of remote working) but overall the talks were well received.
I submitted the article based on this work to go on the GOV.UK blog back in September 2021 but due to some comms scheduling it got put on hold for a time. Unfortunately that meant when the hold lifted the article had to go through a second round of reviews (mostly from the people who'd reviewed it the first time around).
Fun fact, the original draft I submitted was exactly 1000 words. It's a bit more than that now.
It also needed to be updated since the work had progressed. The first draft ended with "we did this, we're going to see how well it works" but it needed updating to "it worked and now we're using it properly". I could probably write a second article on how the change was deployed to the live site - our system is interestingly complex, and I made a 2 hour hole in our scroll tracking data in the process, but all was forgiven.
Despite all the delays and repeating reviews, the process for getting this published felt well handled, and everyone involved was helpful and constructive.
I thought I'd take a break from writing articles for a bit (this was my sixth since I started at GDS) but I've already got a draft for the next one forming in my head. And another one that I already submitted, but needs some changes before it'll go anywhere. It's a rare thing to have work that is really interesting and varied and I'm very grateful for that.