Government Design Principles

Working with the Government Digital Service on the design and build of GOV.UK.

The last couple of weeks have been dominated by one topic – infrastructure. As mentioned in my previous week notes, we’ve been designing and building out the production infrastructure for the View Driving Record service at DVLA. Lots of effort has gone into talking to suppliers, designing what we need and spinning it all up. We’ve been working closely with colleagues from GDS and HMRC who have used similar patterns and who are also in the process of spinning up their infrastructure services. This is giving us the chance to learn from each other and avoid repeating mistakes or falling down rabbit holes. All seems to be going well, but we’ve got at least another couple of weeks of this ahead.

We’re in the middle of a significant change in how people use digital services. Use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is exploding. People should be able to use digital services wherever they are, on the device of …

A bunch of useful tips for programming well (written in 2012)

A bunch of best practices for PHP which I wrote back in 2012

Today we’re publishing our second quarterly progress report on the commitments made in the Government Digital Strategy. Transforming government services http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn5zEQLluoc In 2011 the first challenge we faced was the...

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.