11 Comments

The apostrophe thing: I feel your pain. I get the same when I occasionally come across sites which abhor hyphens. Insane. (And potentially indirectly discriminatory; no idea about the stats, but I suspect there may be ethnicities where hyphenation of surnames is more common than elsewhere. Same, of course, with apostrophes in first names. And I'd LOVE to see someone try to argue some kind of proportional means to a legitimate aim on that one, since the only true reason would be either "our code was written decades ago" or "we can't code to save our lives"...)

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May 24Liked by James O'Malley

Every programmer everywhere needs to read and internalise Patrick McKenzie's classic essay "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names": https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ (this version with counterexamples is also good: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/)

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May 24Liked by James O'Malley

Great post. Agreed, Gov.uk is a pleasure to use, something to celebrate and not everything is quite so terrible(!).

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May 24Liked by James O'Malley

gov.uk is the closest thing know to what Tim O’Reilly called “government as a platform”. Everything should be an API. Nice job of highlighting the political aspect in your post!

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May 24Liked by James O'Malley

The story of digital in the UK government has definitely stalled somewhat but using GOV.UK (https://www.gov.uk/government/ministers/minister-for-the-cabinet-office) I could hazard a guess as to a big factor (just like we could probably have similar discussions about any number of policy domains with similar chaotic ministerial responsibility). Here are our Ministers for the Cabinet Office since 2010.

The Rt Hon John Glen MP

Incumbent

The Rt Hon Jeremy Quin MP

2022 to 2023

The Rt Hon Chris Philp MP

2022 to 2022

The Rt Hon Edward Argar MP

2022 to 2022

The Rt Hon Michael Ellis KC MP

2022 to 2022

The Rt Hon Steve Barclay MP

2021 to 2022

The Rt Hon Michael Gove MP

2020 to 2021

The Rt Hon Oliver Dowden CBE MP

2019 to 2020

The Rt Hon David Lidington CBE

2018 to 2019

The Rt Hon Damian Green MP

2017 to 2017

The Rt Hon Ben Gummer

2016 to 2017

The Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP

2015 to 2016

The Rt Hon Lord Maude of Horsham

2010 to 2015

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May 25Liked by James O'Malley

It’s a massive achievement, and one that is greatly underrated. Large organisations often suffer from this department all segregation of IT systems. Private sector organisations are just as bad if not worse. Mergers and acquisitions are the worst source of mutually incompatible systems, which is the main reason why they never realise the benefits they promise. Even AWS which was all built by the same company over the last decade or so has a huge problem with the Geocities style of web site.

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DVLA is particularly infuriating for people who have to renew their driving licence every three years for medical reasons. For a condition that they say should be possible to renew online ( my mother, a stable epileptic with no recent fits), computer said NO, requiring paper forms and a passport photo. For myself when I was diagnosed with s notifiable condition it took over a year to get a medical licence, due to slow interaction with my consultant. It's the year 2024, WHY IS IT LIKE THIS???

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Totally unrelated, but on the tech theme, there seems to be no way on the Substack app to read footnotes without having to scroll to the end each time. On the desktop version, you can hover the cursor over the number to reveal the content. Mild irritation.

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Jun 3·edited Jun 3

I don't know about the app, but I read it using the web browser on my phone and can just tap the number to get the footnote displayed.

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Enjoyed this- but I do think the accountability deficit highlighted is a serious issue.

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Thanks for this.

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