Two landmark publications: the State of Digital Government Review, and the blueprint for modern digital government are clear - cloud technology is helping to reshape how government works. With the blueprint setting out the long-term vision, and with the Government …
The QCon conference arrived in London this week - it's a big deal for anyone involved in software development. Our technology team at the Government Digital Service (GDS) spoke at...
Acceptance criteria (ACs) are a key part of user stories. They set the boundaries of what should be achieved - telling the developer when to stop, the QA how to test, and the product owner what to expect. Because they’re …
GOV.UK has on average 12 million visits per week. The vast majority of users simply find what they want or need and then leave. However, some users need to print parts of the site. A very few of those users …
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 …
The GOV.UK team recently had a firebreak to repay some technical debt, experiment with things we might not otherwise have the chance to, and prepare for how we're going to iterate the site in 2015. I looked at implementing Content Security Policy …
For much of January, GOV.UK had a firebreak. It’s where teams are given some time to investigate new ideas and clean up technical debt. As part of this we ran a game day. In this blog post I'm going to …
One of the challenges involved in developing a loosely-coupled publishing architecture like www.gov.uk is ensuring that all the components are speaking the same language. At a very basic level, that can just mean agreeing on a standard set of REST …
GOV.UK now holds nearly 150,000 documents and services, so it's not always easy for people to find the things they need. One of the ways that people do this is using GOV.UK’s search box, and in this post I'll describe …
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 …
If you’re interested in jobs in this field, check out all open opportunities on the GDS careers site.