You may have heard, rule number one for us at Government Digital Service (GDS) is: “always start with user needs”. We do user research. Lots of it. GOV.UK Verify recently completed their 100th round of user research, and they’re not …
There seems to be a common belief among front-end developers that progressive enhancement is either old fashioned or has simply been replaced by single page applications. This is a problem of perception. We’d like to explain why we use progressive …
Over the past few months, us developers on the GOV.UK Custom Formats team have been trying out a new approach to software development called mob programming. Instead of individual developers working on stories separately, mob programming involves a group of …
Over the past year at GDS, we’ve been working hard to create a strong technology community. Recently we took a day out of the office together. The GDS Technology community is pretty big – just over 90 civil servants and …
Traditional security processes and ‘security says no’ can often seem to block progress in agile environments but there are ways to build software securely without compromising agility. It’s all about ensuring security is built into your development best practices so …
On Friday 24 June, following the vote to leave the European Union, the Petitions service had to scale fast to accommodate unprecedented traffic levels. This is a guest post from Andrew White, the chief technology officer of Unboxed, on how …
We recently ran a one-day workshop on web security for technologists at the Government Digital Service (GDS). Security is a topic where lots of people lack confidence in their skills so we thought it was a valuable area to focus …
One of the key aspects of how we work is constant iteration. As Government as a Platform progresses into beta with application programming interfaces (API) driven transactional services (rather than pure data access), it’s time to explain how we think …
GDS is constantly on the lookout for great technologists to come and work with us. We have roles open at the moment for technical architects, developers, and web operations engineers but we have other more specific roles in the pipeline …
I spoke recently at the Business Reporter’s Data Security in the Cloud event about how security has changed to face the reality of the modern internet era. The old world of assurance and compliance and ‘security says no’ won't cut …
If you’re interested in jobs in this field, check out all open opportunities on the GDS careers site.