GOV.UK
A frontend crammer
I’ve spent the past few months as part of a team working within the Land Registry alpha. Part of your role as a GDS person within an exemplar is to help existing staff work in new ways and pick up …
Tools
Using Go in government
This is cross posted from the 5th birthday celebration series on the GopherAcademy blog. When the UK Government Digital Service started working on GOV.UK, much of it was built in Ruby. Since then, we’ve used a number of different programming …
Responsive grid system which works in IE6
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 …
CDN acceptance testing for GOV.UK
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 …
Taking another look at GOV.UK's disaster recovery
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 …
Using Mustache with the Play Framework
One of the more interesting stories that came out of our work on Individual Electoral Registration (IER) was our adoption of Mustache, a logic-less templating language.
Using Git to refactor vCloud Tools into separate gems
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 …
How we used vCloud Tools to provision a new platform
We recently moved GOV.UK to a new and improved platform. We used vCloud Tools, open source software developed in-house at GDS, to create the virtual machines and networks required as well as configure the firewall, NAT rules and load balancers. Why …
Building tools to provision our machines
Over the last few months, I’ve been leading a small team building tools to automate creation and configuration of our servers. Tools to automate provisioning Currently, our production environment is hosted with Skyscape, and we manage it using VMware vCloud …
How GDS uses git and github
Other teams around government frequently ask us about our use of GitHub, and rather than bury those answers in email it seemed time to follow Mike Bracken’s directive and publish (not send) our answers. I’ve made some assumptions here about …