Not long to go, we’re counting down the days until Christmas. This week we’ve been finishing off all we can ahead of the festivities…

a snowy lanscape

It’s Christmas Jumper Day 2024!

This year, the team dusted off their Christmas jumpers for our team call on Thursday 12 December. We might be a serious team with proper work to do, but there’s nothing stopping us from having a festive time while we do it!

Getting into a jolly spirit ahead of the holidays was the perfect way to end the year!

Screenshot of the team wearing Christmas jumpers on a call

A new sign-in service for users

After many months of work for Lucinda and the flood product team, the sign in to your flood warnings account service has gone live! Users who sign up for flood warnings can now sign in to update their details or cancel warnings.

Thrown in with the release are some styling and language improvements across the whole service.

screenshot showing the sign in portal

Heledd’s spending a lot of time in workshops with lots of colleagues about a big project - we’ll be able to start sharing more in our weeknotes in the new year.

Heledd and Lucinda went to talk at the North Wales Tech meet up.

Luckily, they didn’t go to the North Wales Tech meet up just for the pizza (which wasn’t available due to a lorry jamming the Menai bridge and traffic backing up the Bangor - making pizza deliveries unavailable!)

presentation clip

It was a great night of learning:

  • FabLab and XLAB - Andy Goodman (Senior Lecturer in Design) and John Story (Laboratory Manager. We loved having a tour of the FabLab and overview of its purpose – it very much took Lucinda and Heledd back to their days of making and creating stuff in college and uni. It’s open to anyone. Lots of cool technology and tools to create - everything from t-shirt printing and embroidery, laser cutting, stickers or circuit board. Although, a reminder to be careful of “is this a solution looking for a problem?” (which we think Lucinda should add to the list of things to create as stickers in the FabLab).
  • Heledd talked about our journey with forms so far at NRW. Carwyn had read our blogs and was keen for us to share our story! We think the talk went well and had a lot of great questions and discussions after the talk. The talk was based on a blog post that Sam, Phil and Heledd have been writing (to be published next week!).
  • The Art of the Pull Request - Ben Lomax (Lead Software Engineer at Kraken Technologies, part of Octopus Energy Group). Ben’s talk was really engaging, and Heledd’s key take away was developers can also benefit from thinking about their user (the reviewer of their code). Ben shared links to a video that had inspired some of his talk: How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You · mtlynch.io

photo of one of the tech presentations

We really enjoyed having the opportunity to share our work with a different audience and listen to other people working in different technical professions talk about their work and passions. Thanks to Carwyn for organising and inviting us to talk (we’ll be back, and look forward to the pizza next time).

Interesting stuff we’re reading / saving to read later

  • Welsh Revenue Authority have a cool new calculator to help people work out how much Land Transaction Tax (LTT) you may need to pay if you buy property or land in Wales.
  • CDPS kicking off user research about pre-application for planning - interested in this from how the environmental considerations are picked up in local authority pre-application stage, but also in terms of general learning about pre-app that could help us (pre-app is an area for future focus and improvements)
  • Reform the state has to deliver for the people – we’d say as a team we’ve always been relentlessly curious (not killed us cats yet) and testing and learning is our mantra.
  • Testing and learning (yes)
  • [The evolving concept of service patterns by Laurence Berry](https://medium.com/the-service-gazette/the-evolving-concept-of-service-patterns-f83347e31629) – this resonates with a lot of thinking and work we’ve been doing over the past couple of years on identifying patterns in services – another area we’re excited about progressing further in 2025

Other things we’ve been working on:

  • Sophie has been busy publishing our monthly permitting reports this week. This is the time of year where we receive a small snowstorm of content to be published before the Christmas holidays, so please bear with us as we prioritise according to external deadlines ahead of the break
  • This week we’ve worked with subject matter experts to publish information on our websites to align with new content published on the Welsh Government’s website. Tasks like this require individuals across teams to work collaboratively to meet externally set deadlines. Creating accessible Welsh language PDF content to host on our website, new links to the latest information as well as the translation and scheduling of the content are all key steps in ensuring we meet deadlines and provide all the necessary guidance to our users
  • Working with the Industry and Waste Regulatory Approaches team, Shaun has now finalised how the website will display guidance on complying with an Environmental Permit for industry. Permit holders were required to follow Best Available Techniques standards set out in documents published by the EU. Following Brexit however, the UK is developing its own Best Available Techniques documents which will be coming into effect piecemeal over the next few years. Previously we had displayed all of these documents on one page, meaning users had to sift through lots of technical documents that were irrelevant to them. The new approach will be to have sector specific pages underneath the main industry landing page. This should mean that the guidance is easier for users to find and consume. A fortuitous side-effect is that these pages should also be quicker and easier for us in the digital team to update, given that there will be numerous and regular updates as further BAT and ‘additional guidance’ documents are published. The pages are away for translation but should be published on the site next week
  • Shaun and Alex met with the Regulatory Business Management Team to discuss the next round of charging updates. In general we agreed that the charging pages for each permitting area that were published last year are doing their job and there is no need to overhaul the ‘Charging Scheme for Environmental Permitting’. We’ve agreed to review the Installation Environmental Permitting charging page as numerous changes to how these are applied have been introduced in the last few months and the page is currently ‘complex’ at best
  • Toyah’s published our latest team blog post: How a content audit led to a better user experience

photo of gold pinecones and baubles on a Christmas tree

Friday Fun Fact - Christmas wasn’t always on December 25

Although Christmas celebrates the birth of Christ, it doesn’t actually mention December 25 anywhere in the bible. In fact, some historians think Jesus was born in the spring, not the winter at all! Christmas on December 25th wasn’t celebrated until about 336 AD.