Reflections on four years in the Civil Service


Terence Eden standing outside Number 10 Downing Street.

Four years ago today, I turned up in Holborn for my first day at GDS - Government Digital Service. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @edent🅁🄴🄶🄴🄽🄴🅁🄰🅃🄸🄾🄽 🅂🅃🄰🅃🅄🅂▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓100% COMPLETE> @edent is now part of @GDSTeam > Press any key to continue…>❤️ 49💬 16🔁 006:37 - Mon 10 October 2016 I've now experienced two Prime Ministers (Primes […]

Continue reading →

Week Notes - Two Years at GDS


The GOV.UK logo.

As of today, I've been employed by GDS for two years. Time for some reflections. The Big Working for the government isn't much different from working for a large business. I know people harp on about the inefficiency of the public sector - I can only assume those people haven't seen how much money FTSE100 […]

Continue reading →

Please don't print this weeknote


Terence Eden standing outside Number 10 Downing Street.

I asked a question in a meeting a few days ago. "What if we just banned Civil Servants from printing anything?" To be clear, this wasn't an entirely serious proposal. But it's how I like to frame a discussion about available option when making a decision: Can we just stop doing this thing? What if […]

Continue reading →

Week Notes - Sick Note


A printed page from the magazine.

Bleugh! After an amazing time at #EMFcamp, I succumbed to the post-festival lurgy. So this week is mostly brought to you by Vick Vapour Rub and Kleenex 🤧 🤧 🤧 Presenting I was honoured to be asked to visit the National Archives in Kew to talk about AI strategy. The whole event was streamed and […]

Continue reading →

Week Notes 5


Terence Eden speaking at a conference.

Short week! Monday was a bank holiday (mostly recovering from my mate Pete's wedding) and Friday was off to EMF Camp. But, I managed to get some work done! LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE! And the accompanying blog post NHS Majority of my time spend on helping run a design sprint for improving some NHS processes with […]

Continue reading →

Weeknotes 4


Terence Eden speaking at a conference.

Welcome back! These are my brief thoughts on what I've been working on this week. Work Blogging! I've written two new blog posts for GDS. I love blogging - but I sometimes shy away from doing it for work. I naïvely think I write practically perfect prose - and then a team of brilliant editors […]

Continue reading →

Weeknotes 3


Terence Eden standing outside Number 10 Downing Street.

Work A light-ish week - which allowed me to concentrate on my backlog. If you're getting a reply from an email you sent last year, sorry! Actually, that's not true - since switching to Google's Inbox I've found it much easier to keep on top of things. Being able to snooze mails and mark them […]

Continue reading →

Week Notes 2


Terence Eden standing outside Number 10 Downing Street.

Covering 2 weeks of holiday and 1 week of work. This is how I've spent my time... Talks The lovely folk at JS Oxford invited me to talk about my recent experiments with SVG. Headlining the bill was the brilliant Nicky Thompson with her talk about CSS shapes. Work Mostly deleting emails, as is appropriate […]

Continue reading →

Week Notes - July 2018


Terence Eden standing outside Number 10 Downing Street.

I've never written a Week Note before, but I was encouraged to do so after an excellent session at the One Team Gov Global conference. Here, in the spirit of openness is what I've been up to, and what I've got wrong in the last few weeks. NHS Open Source A four hour train journey […]

Continue reading →