This is a retropost. Written contemporaneously in 2020, but published four years after the events.
It's May 2020 as I write this. I'm typing to capt

Pushing The Button

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2024-05-07 17:00:05

This is a retropost. Written contemporaneously in 2020, but published four years after the events. It's May 2020 as I write this. I'm typing to capture the moment. Right now, I've no idea what the impact is.

This is the exact moment, on Thursday May 7th, I hit the Big Red Button - three of them! - to open source the UK's COVID-19 Beta test app.

It was thrilling and terrifying. We'd spent the last few weeks getting ready to open source the repos and then, at the last minute, it all went wrong. The plan was to launch on Tuesday - but fate conspired against us.

Redacting history. Probably the most contentious issue. We all wanted to release everything from the very first commit. Would that reveal anything dangerous? Had someone slipped and accidentally committed an API key they shouldn't?

Communications. The other most contentious issue! The department were in "crisis comms" mode. Everything was delayed. No one had reviewed the blog I'd written, there was no pre-arranged plan in place for this sort of thing. Understandable really - this was a tiny piece of a much larger puzzle. But it was still frustrating to wait for people to be ready for us to publish.