These last few days and weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the last year and things I’ve meant to write about, but for many reasons just failed to. So let’s start here. Young Rewired State. It’s just awesome. The idea of getting young people to show off their talents, their creativity, their energy and drive and their pure chutzpah is wonderful. It also is part of the entire revolution we’re in around government digital services. At the first National Hack the Government Day, Richard Pope, along with James Darling, exhorted us to Code a Better Country. He along with many other people who gave up their weekend those two seemingly short years ago now are, being part of Alphagov and now the Government DIgital Service. I digress and as Tom Watson would say, I will come back to them.
Last year, due to pressure of work, I sadly couldn’t mentor and I had to watch enviously as I saw Ben Griffiths helping and inspiring people. This year I cleared as much of my calendar so I could do some mentoring this week. To give back to where I grew up, I’m on a train to Brighton to be with the lovely folks at NixonMcInnes where a Young Rewired State centre is being run. All I could do last year was help build a few scrapers and APIs and that felt good.
What is marvellous about Young Rewired State is the sheer brilliance and yet sheer humility of these people. Take Mr Daniel May for example. He was keen on building a phone app for the recently released Boris Bikes. He needed data, and I’ve been interested in transport data for a while, and it’s proper release so we can make businesses off of it, so I created an API off of some data which was being scraped. What Daniel did was quite amazing. He built a Windows Phone 7 app. They weren’t even released in the UK then, but there it was a beautiful Windows Phone 7 app. Full of Metro UI (he’d clearly studied hard on this) and really nicely made. There’s a picture of it below.
What pleased me, more than anything else that day, was a moment no one else would have seen. Someone from Microsoft bought a phone for him to demo the app on, which was amazing, and then there was the moment, the best bit. When Daniel and the person from Microsoft did the deploy the app onto the pre-release phone I was sent away as I hadn’t been included on the confidentiality agreement. I couldn’t have been more proud at that moment. I’ve been lucky enough to play with pre-release kit for a long while now, but that for me was a huge thing. He’d organised it, Microsoft trusted him.
These young people are our future. Our very near future. They’re incredibly talented and all we can do is to help where we can, pass on experience we have, and hope that we’ll all work together for many years to come. They will push boundaries constantly and we’ll have to run to keep up, and I so look forward to it. Thank you.
