Reminding developers about code reviews
As a junior developer, I’m encouraged to spend 20% of my time at GDS building a project of my choice to support my learning needs - as long as it’s useful to the organisation.
Tools
Modern HTTP for backing services
We have previously written about how we have smoke tests running continuously which check that GOV.UK is responding properly. Late last year, we noticed that we were consistently seeing a problem with the part of GOV.UK served by the Performance …
Major performance issue with Mustache and partials
On April 17th, deep in the pre-election period, we released a new search feature that allows GOV.UK users to search inside long-form web documents called Manuals.
Solving problems with dependency management in Go
In a previous blog post we talked about how we use the programming language Go. But it only briefly touched on the issue of dependency management, where Go is reliant on backwards compatible or vendored software. This post is about …
How we moved vCloud Tools from Coding in the Open to Open Source
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 …
A living style guide for GOV.UK
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 …
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 …
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 …
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