Subscription to two magazines. One I know he wants; one i hope will nicely surprise him.

Yeah, everything I've heard points to this. Kinda doubt conversations were had with ONS web team (or GOV UK team) cos 'Independent'.

I have no prior knowledge, but I wonder if they'd pre-warmed the pdf into a CDN given the likely highly concentrated spike in demand at the moment of publishing. Number of ways you can mess that up...

GDS Local could do some useful stuff to reshape the software market for local gov, but to do so expansively means spending serious political capital. And market shaping is only 'necessary', not 'sufficient'. Improving capability of local gov digital leadership is the must-do.

User needs first
Service design second
Operating model third
Technology fourth

This order is still reversed way too often.

There's nothing worse than a grey Cambridge sadness. (And I've only ever been a visitor).

"There's nothing to stop the wind between here and the Urals"

I'd reckoned traffic wld have dropped over past few yrs due to a bunch of factors, not least AI Overviews. Then got worried about the step change due to opt-in cookie consent, then got cross because historic GOV.UK traffic isn't in National Archive Web Archive, so thought sod it I'd ask for the lot.

(note it's just traffic to www.gov.uk, and so doesn't include visits to actual public services like on this long list govuk-digital-services.herokuapp.com )

We have a winner! It's weekly traffic to www.gov.uk Source data is here: www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/data...

I've read quite a few of these this morning. And safe to say you didn't disappoint, @robmanuelyeah.bsky.social

Remind me to talk to you about 4iP...

The hard problem in Lean/Agile is always working out what questions to ask of whom, and why. Finding out how to reach the right people with the right question. Artefact generation isn't the work, ever since pen and paper. (Or maybe Heroku.)