Blog posts

There’s lots of really good work going on at the moment to make the browser environment more secure. Github wrote up their experience of implementing one of them. These changes don’t just make the users’ experiences more secure, they can have very real direct financial benefits too. Github claim: “Widespread adoption of Subresource Integrity could have largely prevented the Great Cannon attack earlier this year.”

Wired’s piece on how WhatsApp serves 900 million users with only 50 engineers is getting a lot of attention. It’s an incredibly impressive feat, but it’s a shame the article focuses on their use of Erlang rather than looking into what effect the tight focus of the product has. The language is a factor, but it seems like the main reason they’d be able to work with a relatively small team is that they stick to a very small set of features? ...

I’m really excited about the work Adam and team are doing at Department of Health and NHS. It’s great to see them beginning to unveil what they’re up to.

Write up from a departing SoundCloud engineer of that company’s architectural journey. “I am sorry to disappoint my fellow techies, but the reason we migrated to microservices had to do much more with productivity than pure technical matters. I’ll explain.”

One of our junior devs, Tatiana, wrote about her experience speaking at a recent Cambridge University summer school. “Learning to code is not about remembering facts, but about building things. And it’s perfectly acceptable to look up all the knowledge you need online. In fact, part of becoming a developer is becoming efficient at finding things out for yourself. It’s also about asking the right questions, like when there is a bug: could it come from the code I wrote? Which line? What things should I check to find out? What do I need to research to fix it?” ...

Really good piece based on lessons from building out eBay’s cloud infrastructure. “Ephemeral abstractions are things that fail. These may not recover from failures. The best example is a compute (e.g. a VM) with a local disk, an IP address and a hostname.” and “You still need the ability to create parts (e.g. a VM or a network port or a block of storage) when creating durable abstractions, but most users of cloud shouldn’t have to deal with such operations.” ...

Most of my days are filled with short, small meetings and catch-ups. On a good day I make time to prepare for all the meetings that fill my calendar, making a few notes on each one. When I do that they’re more productive and I’m more effective. But until now I’ve not had a good way to bring that together with the calendar that directs me through the day. So I threw together a quick app to help me build up an annotated schedule for my days. My go to language of late has been Go, but I’m still a bit more productive with ruby and rails so it was an easy choice. This was my first chance to try the 4.0 (4.1, in fact) series of rails. There’s not enough to the app to really get a feel for it, but the new secrets.yml file was useful for keeping all my environment variables organised. ...

This post originally appeard on the Technology at GDS blog. Other teams around government frequently ask us about our use of GitHub, and rather than bury those answers in email it seemed time to follow Mike Bracken’s directive and publish (not send) our answers. I’ve made some assumptions here about readers’ familiarity with a few concepts about version control and deployment. Hopefully between the post, some links and the comments we’ll answer many of the more frequent questions. For a deeper look at git check out the freely available book Pro Git. ...

So it’s been nearly a month. I had intended to write a review of 2013 over the Christmas break but between travel and family I decided it better to just let that slide and ease into the new year. We were in Chicago for Christmas and Nashville for New Year, arriving home about a week ago. After a year that involved quite a few trips across the atlantic I’d become fairly blasé about jet lag, but repeating the journey with small children has been a reminder of how bad it can be. Which led to a heavily caffeine-dependent week. ...

This week held two highlights for me. The first was attending our daughter’s first school Christmas play. Having been petrified of standing up in front of people to the point where she refused to take part in her nursery’s graduation ceremony, all of a sudden there she was taking a starring role in two back-to-back productions of “The Whoopsy-Daisy Angel”. We were proud parents, many photos were taken, and it was also great to look around the room and realise how quickly so many of the other families at the school have become familiar. ...