One of the GDS design principles is to do the hard work to make things simple. As part of the work we’ve been doing to migrate our publishing platforms, we’ve been simplifying the infrastructure of our search system. Lots of …
Over the past 18 months or so we've devoted a lot of effort to the programme of migrating our confusing mix of publishing mechanisms to a new, more efficient centralised architecture. We've written a fair amount already about the progress of the migration and some parts of …
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 …
Point 8 of the Digital by Default Service Standard that we publish on GOV.UK says that source code for government services should be open and reusable, and our 10th design principle is "Make things open: it makes things better". We …
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 …
As GOV.UK gets bigger, we often need to revisit the ways that we originally solved some problems. One thing that's changed recently is how we prepare for disaster recovery. Disaster Recovery The reality of working in technology is that software …
This is part one of what will be a series of blog posts about the new dynamic HTTP router that serves GOV.UK. This post describes our original motivations in building the router, and some of our experiences building the prototypes …