It is miles better than my state's local Covid Dashboard (https://coronavirus.iowa.gov/) that is updated fully once a week on Wednesdays. On Monday and Friday they simply post a screenshot of a pixelated version of a summary page only.
The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
101–110 of 118 posts
Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
You will always be faster with worse tools you know than with better tools you don't know.
True but why does it also need terabytes of storage and 12 worker nodes?
i imagine getting something up, quicklh waa a priority, rather than spending longer architecting amd optimising.
Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
#103Wonder why they haven’t used powerBI for that, but deep inside I know why...
Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
#104> From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Kingdom (UK) government has made it a top priority to track key health metrics and to share those metrics with the public. According to Dominic Cummings (ex-adviser to the PM), this isn't true at all - one of their biggest failings early on was to not have the data and not see the priority in getting it.[1] [1] https://news.sky.com/story/dominic-cummings-heari…
Well, it depends what time period you're talking about.
In early March 2020, they briefly announced that the daily COVID figures would move to a weekly cadence.
When locking down, they were still flying blind, and after that (during Hancock's 100k tests a day moonshot) there were leaks that "figures were being compiled in a notebook by calling round different labs".
Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. For example, the Dutch corona dashboard (coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl) is a statically rendered dashboard using Next that gets updated daily. No backend and it's super fast. Maybe I'm not objective because I'm Dutch myself, but from both a user-facing and technical perspective I think the Dutch dashboard is by far the best corona dashboard in the world. It's very fast, has a lot of detailed visualization…
Looking at the Dutch site on my phone (Samsung S10) I noticed it took a little while to load compared to the nigh instant loading of the UK Gov variant. Looking at Page Insights [0] [1] tells a similar picture. Desktop time to interactive times of 0.4s Vs 3.5s and Mobile time to interactive times of 4.5s Vs 13.1s. The Dutch website seems to spend a lot of that time running the Next JS framework stuff, which the Gov.u…
On my iPhone Xr, older than S10, it loads very fast. Also performance depends on which page you benchmark. Landing page is faster for UK, but the cases pages is about twice as fast for the NL dashboard (time to interactive 2.4s for NL vs 4.4s for UK). Also first meaningful paint is faster (0.5s vs 0.8s). This proves that you can get decent performance without an overly bloated costly architecture.
Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. For example, the Dutch corona dashboard (coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl) is a statically rendered dashboard using Next that gets updated daily. No backend and it's super fast. Maybe I'm not objective because I'm Dutch myself, but from both a user-facing and technical perspective I think the Dutch dashboard is by far the best corona dashboard in the world. It's very fast, has a lot of detailed visualization…
I'd say that using Next for a static site is just as over engineered, personally.
I disagree. Expressing your frontend layout as code is not over engineering at all imo. It makes it easier to re-use code and is great for testability. Next is perfect for this use case. I actually think the code is quite elegant too. It's open source, so don't take my word for it, but have a look for yourself: https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-data-dashboard/tree/dev....
Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
#107I do wonder if the power of a distributed database is really needed here; it gets ~1 update a day, so there's no need to have clever consistency stuff. Most of the queries relate to either today's data (you open the map and zoom in to see how doomed your area is today), or the graphs showing a standard set of history (e.g. cases over the last year). You'd think you could extract that data to be static and not require…
It’s entirely unnecessary. The data is updated too infrequently to justify anything like this.
I built a one-pager vanilla JS site that polls the official Johns Hopkins aggregated data daily, and displays dynamically generated smoothed moving average charts, performs curve similarity analysis to identify similar patterns in different countries, and performs logarithmic regression to depict current doubling/halving times.
This happens entirely on the client side, with no server side component whatsoever (other than the http server to deliver the static HTML&JS that does all the work). See https://covid-19-charts.net/
Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
#108I like the UI design in figure 1. There’s no crap in the way of the data but i don’t feel overwhelmed either. My eyes can scan across sections and it feels natural, theres no firehose effect. I like the thought that’s gone into showing the % vaccinated in the top right. I like the dashed underlines telling me that some explainatory text is available. I think the page looks inoffensive but is clearly focussed on being…
I think GOV.UK in general does a very good job of making important information readily available. It’s however extra jarring switching between the clean/efficient style of the online messaging and the underlying public services/offices that are still held together by chewing gum and a fax machine, whenever you have some issue that can only be resolved by persuading a human to stamp some paper (Visas, public records,…
It was a lot worse a decade ago. The GDS have done a pretty good job of unifying the design language and methodology of disparate government departments, but of course, it is a huge job. It clearly involves just as much cultural and organisational overhaul as it does technology work.
Most recently I found the DVLA license renewal was one of those ugly backwaters (albeit still fully online), but their license check code generator is great.
For real terrible stuff, check out local council websites.
Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Despite the downvotes the only incorrect statement here is that Boris has a lordship. Go export the ONS data yourself and analyse it unless your too lazy to see what I mean
> Go export the ONS data yourself and analyse it unless your[sic] too lazy to see what I mean If you're going to make such claims then the onus is you to provide the evidence.
Surely the onus is on the person claiming it's tampered?
Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Go export the ONS data yourself and analyse it unless your[sic] too lazy to see what I mean If you're going to make such claims then the onus is you to provide the evidence.
Surely the onus is on the person claiming it's tampered?
Not tampered processed and misrepresented. Two my where you can remove the logarithmic plots on the MS data. Tell me where you can get the data behind this great firewall of information other than FOI requests and do gain some basic literacy in stats to spot some of the obvious oddities in the datasets (they're there)