Blog posts

It’s been about ten days and it feels a lot longer, but recently we unveiled a rather important beta: GOV.UK. That beta is a “live operational test” of a new single-domain for government. It’s a radically simplified way for people needing UK government information and services, built in-house with a set of publishing tools that lay the groundwork for a broader platform. This beta came out of the work a team of us did to build alpha.gov.uk, itself a deeply unusual creation for a government website: built by an in house team, ruthless in scope and relentless in user focus, and above all a prototype designed to trigger conversations. The alpha worked: it triggered good, constructive conversations, it helped us identify things that worked and others that didn’t. It paved the way for the creation of the Government Digital Service and to the beta of GOV.UK. ...

Like many others I’ve been spending a lot of time with OAuth2 lately. The single-sign-on system we’ve built at GDS acts as a very simple oauth provider for our other apps (effectively just joining up the oauth2-provider and devise gems), and we’re probably going to be extending our API adapter code so that we can use it for those apps whose APIs need authentication. What I’d not explored for a while was the simplest way to implement app-to-app oauth where there’s no UI for user interaction so over the New Year break I pulled something together for another project. It’s all pretty straightforward but not very well documented so I thought I’d better share. ...

We spend a lot of time at work talking about APIs so Anant Jhingran’s " Six API predictions for 2012" was a particularly relevant read among the current glut of review/prediction pieces. The section on “API-centric architectures” particularly chimes with our approach and the idea of an “outside-in model” resembles what I was getting at in " Building APIs, building on APIs". I quite like the use of the phrase “outside-in”, and the iterative approach implied in: ...

Nearly five months ago we revealed Alpha.gov.uk. And then this blog became even quieter. It’s been a few months of big transitions, two of which had to be kept quiet for a while. Since I last wrote here we’ve been busy arranging a move of house (from Harringay to Homerton), have discovered we’ve got another child on the way, and I’ve become a Civil Servant. All three are exciting changes, but it’s the last that I sat down to write about here. For several years I’ve been working on building Ket Lai, initially alone, then with James Weiner, and gradually with a wider selection of collaborators. Things were going well, and we were building up a solid base of clients and getting close to having a couple of products of our own to release. But when the call to the public sector came, it didn’t take long to agree that we’d put Ket Lai on the back-burner and jump on board. ...

Late last night I commented out the HTTP authentication settings, and Alpha.gov.uk was live. I’ve not slept much since then, but so far everything seems to be running smoothly. Apart from my email and twitter clients which are swimming in a deluge of feedback. There’s a quick post from me on the Alphagov blog exploring the way we’re handling geographic information and place names. A longer post is coming later in the week with an outline of the technical architecture of the site, and a few more will follow exploring more nitty gritty details. ...

I’ve been working on an entry for the Alpha.gov.uk blog for publication later this week. The idea is to give a quick overview of how we’ve approached the technical side of building that prototype. It’s been tricky as we have a very diverse audience and a lot of ground to cover, but hopefully it’ll be a helpful start and the coming (post-reveal) weeks will allow a bit more space to expand on some of the key components. Maybe even open source a thing or two? ...

Last time I got round to writing weeknotes I mentioned an exciting new project. I wasn’t meant to say much about it, which is part of the reason that was the last time I got round to writing weeknotes. But today a post on the Cabinet Office digital engagement blog took the wrappers off and we can begin to talk about what we’re up to. ...

It’s a week now since I got off the plane home from my second SxSW Interactive. I’ve primarily spent the intervening time catching up with work, but it’s also provided a little space to read a few other peoples’ take on the event, to listen to the Tech Weekly podcast that the Guardian produced at the event, and to look out for patterns. It seems I was far from alone in starting this year’s South By complaining about the size, but then finding that that subsided as the week wore on. It definitely had a very different feel from just two years ago (and even then people were commenting on how big it was). With events spread around town, distance between talks was a very real consideration in choosing what to go to. Or whether to go to anything at all. Most of the central food establishments had intimidating queues. ...

Ben wrote a piece about a typeface that a lot of people in the UK will have seen around, and are hopefully seeing a lot of at the moment. It’s the one being used by the Fairtrade Foundation on all their materials, and it’s really quite nice. We don’t often hear the stories behind fonts, but since Fair Trade is in large part about hearing the stories behind things we take for granted it’s good to hear this one. So head over to Noisy Decent Graphics and have a read. ...

Matt Thompson’s " A 5-minute framework for fostering better conversations in comments sections" has cropped up in my twitter feed several times over the past few days but it wasn’t until the flight to SxSW that I got a chance to read it. It collects together lots of sensible stuff, and distills it quite helpfully. Definitely something I’ll come back to next time we’re designing commenting systems, or their like. But the line that really leapt out at me was: ...