Blog posts

Last week I delivered the opening keynote at Salford University’s Future of Government ICT conference. Sadly I was only able to be there for an hour or so and didn’t get a chance to hear any of the other speakers, but it was fun to get a little time there and to talk with a few participants. The talk was trying to jam together an update on what GDS is working with and some thoughts on what’s going on in the tech world more generally. That was a lot to cover in half an hour! ...

Originally posted on the Technology at GDS blog. Over the course of the past few years many teams across government have begun publishing their code under open source licenses. That’s a change that’s been pushed by the Digital by Default Service Standard but it’s just as much a result of the change in development culture that’s permeating the civil service, with teams eager to share their work. Despite that, releasing code is still a challenge for many teams and it can be one of the trickier areas of service assessments for many. Recently, Alex wrote about the work that the GOV.UK team did to open up their infrastructure code. Another project GDS has been deeply involved in that has been looking at opening up its code is the Register to Vote service. ...

Over Christmas I spoke with a team in the US government who are pulling together some work on open source policy on that side of the Atlantic. To help them I tried to document recent UK government history on the topic. Having done that it seemed helpful to publish it somewhere in case I ever need to referene it, but the GDS blogs didn’t feel quite right. This is definitely incomplete and I know a lot of other people were doing a lot of work. There’s a clear GDS-centric slant here because that’s what I know first hand. If you spot any particular egregious missing pieces, feel free to use the comments to add them. ...

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. ...