Until recently, career development for technologists at GDS was relatively unstructured, and dependent on what opportunities came up. Over the last few months I’ve been leading on developing a more structured career path for developers and web operations engineers. This …
We’re about to start recruiting for several developer jobs, and we thought it would be worth explaining how we’ve updated our application process since the last time we blogged about it. GDS wants to attract the best candidates to join …
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 …
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.
This Parliament ends on 30 March. Between then and the general election on 7 May is the pre-election period and the Civil Service communicates less, in line with the General Election Guidance.
Web server configuration can be tricky to get right. Applications like nginx or apache are flexible and powerful. However this flexibility can result in configuration which is hard to understand, hard to maintain, and easy to accidentally break. On the …
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 …
If you’re interested in jobs in this field, check out all open opportunities on the GDS careers site.