At GDS, most of our code is publicly available in our alphagov organisation on GitHub. We call this “Coding in the Open” rather than “Open Source”. As James explained in a previous blog post this is because for most of …
When trying to develop a site with a consistent look and feel it’s common to develop a style guide with patterns which can be reused across the site. This lets designers easily reuse standard patterns and lets developers know how …
This post is about choosing user stories to work on from a product backlog, and the lessons I learned from taking on big pieces of work.
We have a grid we use on GOV.UK which is based on percentage width columns (multiples of either 25% or 33% of the container width) with a 30px gutter between the grid columns. The columns on narrower devices shrink appropriately …
GOV.UK has used a Content Delivery Network (CDN) since its transition from beta to live in October 2012. When the contract with our first CDN provider came to an end in September 2013, we took advantage of what we'd learned …
We have written about how regular releases are good and that we practice what we preach on GOV.UK but we have never communicated what we actually do. We have just over 50 applications that we release to GOV.UK, some more …
As GOV.UK gets bigger, we often need to revisit the ways that we originally solved some problems. One thing that's changed recently is how we prepare for disaster recovery. Disaster Recovery The reality of working in technology is that software …
Today a minor change to our main site search went live. I hope it is an improvement in the experience of searching the site using a screen reader. The problem Here is the search page on GOV.UK. It has a …
Hello, I’d like to draw your collective attention to two challenges for open standards: exchange of calendar events exchange of contact information The date of the next bank holiday is one of the top needs answered by GOV.UK. I like …
When I started working on vCloud Tools, we had most of our functionality in one repository. There wasn’t a clear separation of concerns – the code was tightly coupled – and it also meant that a user who only wanted …
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