Anna Goss - Notes

Almost ten years ago, I read a blog post about the RAT: the Riskiest Assumption Test.

It's just rained.

My new favourite metaphor for ‘what the work looks like’.

We’ve put FF Studio into liquidation.

I’m still trying to close tabs.

I’ve got a lot of open browser tabs from over the past two years.

We just closed FF Studio.

Five weeks of pretty much consistently 3 days a week at the gym except for one week where I only made it once.

I don't know if a term has ever been so ubiquitous, so quickly as "vibe coding".

I have blogged since 2022 but elsewhere like everyone who has every written a blog post or weeknote, I convinced myself that the platform was the issue, not the...not writing. it didn’t take very long to write a script to export Tumblr posts to Markdown,…

went for a beer with Alice and suggested I might write a weeknote when I got home we each had two pints of Neck Oil. it was £6.30 for one pint.

noting as I look down the sidebar of iAWriter that Angus shaming me into writing week notes lasted three notes. it seems that shame isn’t a great motivator. for whatever reasons, the world has felt ridiculously heteronormative recently, whether in the fil…

so many browser tabs. so many half started thoughts. so many “maybe I’ll be more productive when I’ve…..” moments.

despite having taken three days off the week before last, I remain very much at the end of my tether.

Angus shamed me into writing again. what you saying, Chris, Hurrell?

back on this ‘self reflection’ bullshit. we’ve moved, to Brighton right next to the South Downs, so now I strip wallpaper for fun. having enough space for us each to have an office is amazing, walks on the South Downs every morning are amazing, the sea po…

thing about everyone caring about GOV.UK on the internet again this week: there’s no way to make everyone happy. it’s a public service, so everyone feels a bit of ownership. fair enough.

shed mouse has got some nerve. first eating our Brexit spaghetti. and now it’s taken to eating the caps off bike chain lube (that’s two bottles lost to it now) and the straps of every single piece of bike luggage I own. humane or kill trap?

cancelled an American Express card that I only got because I wanted some free lounge access. free for year 1, £140 for year 2 and every year after that, and when I got the £140 bill this month I was like “wuuuuut nooooooo”. anyway, the point is: never had…

the week before last, I didn’t want to write a weeknote. last week, I just didn’t make the time for it. sorry to my 25 week streak. we cleaned out / tided the shed.

fell off my bike on the way back from the shops on Friday morning. clipped a bin and came off sideways on a route I’ve done probably 150-200 times. there are bruises, no skin was broken, I only cried ten hours later after C got home and was nice to me. ar…

completely adore the Surly. cables are starting to stretch a bit already, but I’ll deal with that in a few weeks. only ridden it twice since the last weeknote - once with C on her way to work again, once today to go to the shops in Peckham - but I love it.

enjoyed the occasional chat this week about what’s “right” with regards to the acquisition of stuff. all kinds of stuff. food. other stuff. this article in the New York Times ends with the line “Sometimes a fleece is only a fleece.

another mad work week. worked through the weekend prototyping a new form which went live on GOV.UK today.

well, what a mad week to join GOV.UK. the past five days been a combination of finding my place, figuring out GOV.UK, remembering how to deliver, not putting my back out, learning how to work remotely. and probably something else too. it feels like it’s b…

Rebecca Solnit once again making the case for hope as a form of resistance.

just full of bad energy this week. didn’t want to write these at all. but there we go. one of the things I think about a lot around ‘leadership’ is kind of based on Paul Ford’s post about how irony doesn’t scale. essentially boiling down to, how do you pr…

I’ve had two nightmares about getting on planes. hugely excited to stay grounded for at least another week after working out last Friday that I’ve been in flight for over 60 hours in the past month. that’s before hanging around in airports or getting to t…

this is another weeknote written from an airport.

went on holiday to Sri Lanka. we met some elephants and saw loads of birds (the type with feathers). for the first time ever I took the exact right number of books on holiday.

turns out gallivanting round London when you’re still a bit jetlagged is actually exhausting. went to Daunt Books for an event with Hisham Matar on Wednesday night. the first time I went to Daunt I was a child and it was my schoolfriend’s mum’s book launch

skipped last week. wrote something. didn’t publish it.

I had no idea whether to write a weeknote last Friday or not because I’d already posted two that week. had a great dream on Saturday night that, one way or another, Max and I ended up hiring a Zipcar and driving Taylor Swift to her gig in Glasgow. the best

what was last Friday?

Philip Pullman was always better than JK Rowling anyway more on transactions, aka the two things I’d forgotten when I wrote about library fees last week: at With Associates, we ate lunch with each other quite often.

we had a very gentle design team meeting this morning, not least because it was the design team Christmas party last night. passing a panettone around in a circle the morning after the night before felt like about the right level for me today. nothing but…

Jack tweeted earlier in the week about feeling at a bit of a dead end, and how do you find a mentor etc etc.

I asked about sci fi on Twitter earlier in the week. there were so many replies that now I have absolutely no idea of where to start, except for starting with the books that Will brought in for me the very next day. actions speak louder than words IN ACTI…

had my last Italian lesson before my teacher goes and has a baby and takes a bit of time off. unprompted, she told me that I am her best student. well maybe tied with someone else but they do loads of homework. obviously I was delighted, and then I sudden…

I’m in Manchester today helping another department out with recruitment. it’s nice learning about what other bits of government are doing.

at one point this week I had a bit of a breakdown which involved sentences like “I don’t want to be responsible anymore!”.

DOTI Fest was great. not least giving myself permission to go to things that I’m interested in. for a very short period of time, I was going to skip the design x climate crisis workshop, because I had a bunch of office-work to do and I thought, maybe I sh…

obviously I’m always banging on about pensions in terms of civil service benefits but do we mention on Civil Service Jobs that the Cabinet Office VPN allows you to watch iPlayer when abroad?

I started the week by emailing a whopping three people on my team about my priorities for the week.

Hurrell’s writing weeknotes and they’re so damn good that I thought I’d try too. got back from Buenos Aires on Monday morning.

Civil Service (CS) Pensions are quite complicated.