Blog posts

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“73”] An early draft of MetaLoca by Chris[/caption]I don’t make it to many hack days. Domestic life with two kids and the tendency of my day job to spill into the weekends make it tricky. But I couldn’t pass over the chance to play with BERG’s Little Printeryesterday the weekend before last. Conveniently it’s also Kari’s workplace, so she and the kids came along and were ably entertained by the BERG team (special thanks to Helen for keeping an excited three year old busy). ...

During the opening keynote of QCon London yesterday Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parsons explored “The Data Panorama” and naturally that involved talking about visualisations as tools to explore large volumes of data. It was mostly very sensible but it reopened my unease about the way we all too often gloss over the fact that the very properties that can make visualisations so effective to communicate large lumps of data also make them a very effective means of misleading us. ...

I really appreciated John Nunemaker’s recent post about the way they’re using Kestrel (a distributed message queue) in Gauges. There’s nothing revolutionary in the way that Kestrel’s being used here, from the post it seems to be a fairly standard use case for it, but it’s a lovely example of detailing the day-to-day work of growing a web app that blogs are so good for. And it’s particularly good to read about the stages they went through as they tested each component in turn, in production, before switching over to them completely. ...

The second of the three GOV.UK beta releases was unveiled last week. " INSIDE GOVERNMENT" is the promised “corporate publishing platform” designed to bring together the core web publishing activity of all government departments in one place. Neil’s written very eloquently about it on the Government Digital Service blog, outlining some of their core challenges, and James Mead has added the developers’ perspective on the Free Range blog about their involvement in it. It’s a strange release for me—it was the first of GDS’ launches that I didn’t press the button for, or even attend as I’m currently out on paternity leave—but I’m really delighted to see it out there for the world to feed back on. Since I first heard about the vision for the single domain I’ve been excited about the possibility that government information could be published in a way that allows it to be sliced along axes other than ‘department’ and “INSIDE GOVERNMENT” begins to give some life to that. ...

It’s taken me a little while to get to Aaron Straup Cope’s write up of his Personal Digital Archiving conference talk, but I’m rather glad I have. The talk is an exploration of what we might do if flickr disappeared tomorrow; it’s a topic many of us have been pondering at least since the news broke of yahoo’s decision to “sunset” delicious. Two elements of the talk really grabbed my attention. ...

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. ...