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New Year, New Blog

19 January 2014

Blogs are a bit like gyms. The stats for people starting in the new year, with good intentions and resolutions, must be very similar. Fingers crossed this one lasts longer and we stay on the treadmill. And we’ll wipe down the equipment between posts.

Cardiff Uni’s been pretty quiet up to now when it comes to blogging what we do behind the scenes. That was partly due to the steam-powered blogging platform that existed previously. Now, as part of our web transformation programme, we have this lovely new site. And the best way to improve a service is to use it yourself.

There still seems to be a place for blogs, despite the rise of Twitter and Tumblr (though being in Cardiff, we’ve got a valid excuse to include Sherlock gifs…). This will be a place where we publish some of the longer form interesting development work happening at the university.

A robot in Cardiff (you try and find a decent "development" picture...)
A robot in Cardiff (you try and find a decent “development” picture…)

So what’s going to live here? We’ve been having a nose around some of our colleagues, both in higher education, the public sector, and the private sector. We particularly like Bath’s web services blog – they’re on a similar agile journey to ourselves. Obviously everyone loves GDS nowadays, and we’re fond of the BBC’s technical blogs – especially when they’re down the road from us. So expect content along similar lines.

We’ve taken a slightly wider view though. Behind the scenes HE blogs often seem to be from one team, commonly web or IT. As is the way of much development now, we’re very much cross team and cross department, working as a virtual team. So expect posts about web development, application integration, data & analytics, research happening, what’s going on in the local development community across Cardiff and the south west, and any job opportunities here.

So, speaking of events and job opportunities, a couple to start off with:

This weekend (25th & 26th Jan) Cardiff University is hosting http://nhshackday.com. If you’re a developer, designer, or work in health with a great idea, then register and come along.

We’re also hiring for someone to lead our web infrastructure team. If you know about servers, and puppet means more to you than just cookie monster, then please apply. It’s hard work, but we have lots of exciting projects going on, good holidays, and tea & buns on Tuesdays.