I've decided to keep doing the annual end of the year reflections, iterating further on the structure I used in 2021 and 2020. What follows is a mix of personal reflections on the year, as well as a brief lists of the things I've enjoyed watching, reading and playing. Working This year I've split my … Continue reading Reflecting on 2022
Now that I work in the energy sector I'm trying to pay closer attention to how the data infrastructure in that area is evolving. Here's a round up of some current and recent projects that I've been keeping an eye on. Along with some thoughts on their scope, overlaps and potential outcomes. Ofgem review of … Continue reading Round up of some current energy sector data infrastructure projects
I've written a reflection point about growing vegetables for the last two years (2020, 2021) so I'm going to keep going. It's useful to plan ahead. And it's nice to think about the spring and summer when it's so cold and dark outside! What did I set out to do this year? My goals for … Continue reading Gardening Retro 2022
One of the big projects we've currently got under way at Energy Sparks is redesigning the collection of pages that present the results of our detailed analysis of their energy data to school users. The existing pages have been around for a few years and our metrics and user testing has shown that they aren't … Continue reading Useful resources for designing data rich pages
I heard about VHS recently. It's a tool for creating recordings of command-line tools, so you can create little demos and tutorials about how to use them. You can write a script to run commands, manipulate and theme the terminal and produce output in a range of formats. I started thinking about how I could … Continue reading Recreating sci-fi terminals using VHS
I've been tidying up some of my online presence this week, including getting rid of a server I wasn't using any more and moving some project around. One of those was a project I did a few years ago to digitise some historical maps of Bath, georeference them so they can be overlaid onto current … Continue reading Viewing historical maps of Bath in Google Earth
I enjoy writing design patterns. I find them a useful way to clarify my thinking around different solutions to problems across a whole range of areas. A well-named pattern can also help to clarify and focus discussion. I've written a whole book of Linked Data patterns and lead a team that produced a set of … Continue reading Highlighting harms when writing design patterns
I recently attended the launch event for the new Power To Change Community Tech Fund and have been reading through the essays and report on the Community Tech network website. It's great to see this topic getting some attention and much needed funding. It's also prompted me to reflect a bit on my own experience … Continue reading Reflecting on Energy Sparks as a “Community Tech” project
I've found my new favourite example of a well documented, tiny slice of data infrastructure. I'm going to hazard a guess that it's probably the simplest dataset that is designated as national statistics. If you can think of one simpler, then let me know. It's the weekly road fuel prices data on gov.uk. This data … Continue reading It’s just a spreadsheet, but it’s still data infrastructure
This privacy notice went past in my twitter stream earlier. It announces that the UK government is planning to create a new database that will some quite detailed data about every electricity meter in the UK. In particular it'll combine together information about the meter, the energy consumption and billing details associated with that energy … Continue reading Notice of plans to erect…another big database
Lost Boy 