Our approach to API authentication
We’ve recently written a number of blog posts on APIs covering the basic areas like making use of HTTP, URIs, JSON and CSV, as well as on the topic of more complex subjects like how to iterate. There are further …
We’ve recently written a number of blog posts on APIs covering the basic areas like making use of HTTP, URIs, JSON and CSV, as well as on the topic of more complex subjects like how to iterate. There are further …
You may have heard, rule number one for us at Government Digital Service (GDS) is: “always start with user needs”. We do user research. Lots of it. GOV.UK Verify recently completed their 100th round of user research, and they’re not …
GOV.UK gets a lot of visits from people in the UK and further afield. We keep a record of all visits and use this data to support as many users as possible. Deciding which browsers to test We’ll try to …
We’ve recently begun using container tools on GOV.UK Pay to help us run the platform locally and make development less resource heavy. GOV.UK Pay consists of several interacting microservices: a citizen front end, a government service admin interface, a public …
On the GOV.UK team, all our changes are peer reviewed using Github's pull request system. If a developer wants to make a change to one of our projects, they need another developer’s approval before the change is accepted into the …
Over the past year at GDS, we’ve been working hard to create a strong technology community. Recently we took a day out of the office together. The GDS Technology community is pretty big – just over 90 civil servants and …
We recently ran a one-day workshop on web security for technologists at the Government Digital Service (GDS). Security is a topic where lots of people lack confidence in their skills so we thought it was a valuable area to focus …
One of the key aspects of how we work is constant iteration. As Government as a Platform progresses into beta with application programming interfaces (API) driven transactional services (rather than pure data access), it’s time to explain how we think …
Our team is building a Platform as a Service (PaaS) for government so developers can quickly and easily host websites. We’re using the open source Cloud Foundry (CF) technology to ensure reliable hosting, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for our …
There's an important difference in how we use Git at GDS compared to lots of other organisations. We're very thorough when using version control because we don't want to waste the effort we've put into writing code. If our code …