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 …
We're looking to significantly increase the size of our teams as we plan for the next phases of GOV.UK, GOV.UK Verify, the Performance Platform and other GDS projects. There are loads of different types of work to do and we're …
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 …
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 …
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.
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