GOV.UK Technology Blog
technology.blog.gov.uk · Company blog · on HN since 2019
The GOV.UK Technology Blog is written by UK Government Digital Service staff on building and running government websites.
What HN saysHN commenters cite it for its progressive enhancement approach and its petitions scaling writeup, and a GDS hiring post links to it.
30HN people shared it
18linked it in comments
23stories submitted
1.1Kstory points
8 months agolast shared
2019people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Why the Gov.uk Design System team changed the input type for numbers9 people · 896 points · first shared 2020 · 173 comments on HN
- 2Why we use progressive enhancement to build GOV.UK4 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 3We fixed a strange ‘week year’ bug3 people · 6 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Using jemalloc to get to the bottom of a memory leak (2015)3 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 5Scaling the petitions service following the eu referendum3 people · first shared 2019
- 6Our cloud lock-in guidance and case study2 people · 4 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 7Simple things are complicated: making a show password option2 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 8UK Government Selects OpenAPI v31 people · 158 points · first shared 2019 · 31 comments on HN
- 9Moving .gov.uk to a new registry1 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 10How we fixed connection reset errors on Gov.uk Pay1 people · 3 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 11Speeding up Gov.uk with HTTP/21 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 12Managing UK Government Digital Service internal infrastructure during lockdown1 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 13Developing Gov.uk with Docker1 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 14What I like about being a developer at GDS (UK Government Digital Service)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 15Being a Front End Developer at GDS (Government Digital Service) in the UK1 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
tommytecrec · 2019-07-02
Government Digital Service | London, UK | Full-Time | Onsite | Developers
Government Digital Service (GDS) is helping to redefine how a modern government should serve its citizens. Our work is cutting-edge and award-winning. It is improving the lives of millions of people.
We are looking for Developers with strong Ruby knowledge to help GDS build and run world-class public services for the digital age. You will work in small, multidisciplinary agile teams.
Users always come first and everything we do should meet their needs.
Read more - https://technology.blog.gov.uk/
Some of our benefits: flexible working hours + brilliant work life balance, choice of hardward, Civil Service pensions, 25 days annual leave
Apply here: https://app.jobvite.com/j?cj=oweaafwO&s=hackernews
*Must have right to work in UK
pabs3 · 2022-03-19
They should recommend people use progressive enhancement, that helps a lot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progressive-enhan…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12538144
g_p · 2021-01-06
That's the one, progressive enhancement.
A great principle, and nice to see they even think about Lynx accessing the sites [0]
The post I was thinking about with the analysis of why JS/CSS shouldn't be assumed to work was [1].
[0] https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progressive-enhan…
[1] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missing-out-on-…
Nooshu · 2020-04-07
I'd be very careful recommending this method for loading webfonts. By Base64 encoding your fonts into a CSS file you are adding 1000's of bytes into a browsers critical path (since CSS is render blocking). You are also removing the browser ability to choose the most optimum font it supports (i.e. one with better compression like WOFF2). Requests are cheap, especially when using HTTP/2 (which multiplexes over a single TCP connection).
If you do use this method, I highly recommend testing both the standard loading method vs Base64 method on a low spec device (e.g. Moto G4 via WebPageTest) and seeing which performs best for your website.
This method used to be used on GOV.UK until we removed it 18 months ago. I wrote about the change here if you are interested: https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2018/10/04/making-gov-uk-pages-load-fas…
johnnycab · 2019-03-21
We already had a robust set of tools in our technology stack to help us scale. Our primary tool is a combination of Amazon CloudFormation and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which we use to automatically deploy and scale instances in response to demand. Backing these instances is a PostgreSQL RDS database which acts as our primary data store. One other component in our stack is Amazon ElastiCache, a key-value store configured with the open-source Memcached engine, which caches generated fragments of HTML so we can speed up page build times.
https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/08/16/scaling-the-petitions-servic…
Perhaps, a petition is required to employ a new Cloud Architect, as this is not the first time the Petitions service has had to cope with extra traffic & spew out 502 Bad Gateway error.
stedaniels · 2019-03-21
Andrew White at the GDS[0] wrote about "Scaling the Petitions service following the EU Referendum"[1] back in August 2016. I wonder if we'll have another write up after this petition?
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service
[1] https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/08/16/scaling-the-petitions-servic…
WickyNilliams · 2022-12-27
Even if safari had the greatest date picker ever conceived, don't use date pickers for date of births. They will never be better or faster than typing your DOB. Pickers are best for choosing dates that aren't known ahead of time, or where you need to know how a date relates to week days / week numbers etc.
The proposed solution of using number inputs is also not great, since they have a host of accessibility issues [0] You want a regular text input with inputmode="numeric" and a pattern attr. This will give the correct numeric keyboard on mobile, and work just as well in desktop, without any of the associated issues.
I've built several date pickers, I know how hard they can be to get right. But they shouldn't bbw blindly used for any date value, they should be a deliberate choice
[0] https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2020/02/24/why-the-gov-uk-design-system…
pbhjpbhj · 2019-03-21
More info at https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/08/16/scaling-the-petitions-servic…
I'm not a db person, but are they sharding. Surely as they're only writing simple tuples with a petition they can easily write to multiple separate dbs (shards I guess) and amalgamate the results at leisure?
That link says they need to update the web content perpetually, but it seems it's only the number of signatories they need to keep live, isn't it. So once it breeches 100k then they can estimate the signatory rate (including acceleration) and update the row count when they think 200k will be breeched - at 1k/min updating the row count each hour is fine, presumably. Surely that's not a massive processing job?
I'd love some input here, because naively it seems like they're not handling that much data? A million rows of 1kB is still only 1GB, and they're only gathering a few simple fields in each tuple??
Sarkie · 2026-03-16
I nice use case too
https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2015/12/11/using-jemalloc-to-get-to-the…
wizzwizz4 · 2024-06-04
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressive-enhance…
> You should not assume the reason for designing a service that works without CSS or JavaScript is because a user chooses to switch these off.
> There are many situations when extra layers can fail to load or are filtered, for example:
https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progressive-enhan…
> It’s important to understand that it’s often not the conscious choice of users to arrive at your site without JavaScript. We did some research and discovered that 0.9% GOV.UK visits are by people who don’t have JavaScript available and haven’t chosen to turn it off.
Sayrus · 2024-04-17
Hijacking back button, shortcuts and key events has to be one of the most annoying thing. This breaks autocomplete/autocorrect, paste and many other use-case like the author encountered.
Related to accessibility concerns of numeric and number input, there is a good blog post from UK Gov that was on the front page a (long?) while ago: https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2020/02/24/why-the-gov-uk-design-system…
operator-name · 2022-07-18
The UK Government design team have a blog post on this: https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2020/02/24/why-the-gov-uk-design-system…
> Avoid using inputs with a type of number
> Do not use <input type="number"> unless your user research shows that there’s a need for it. With <input type="number"> there’s a risk of users accidentally incrementing a number when they’re trying to do something else - for example, scroll up or down the page. And if the user tries to enter something that’s not a number, there’s no explicit feedback about what they’re doing wrong.
(https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/text-input/#numbers)
sevenf0ur · 2022-07-18
GOV.UK found that type=number actually hurts accessibility and is riddled with usability problems:
https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2020/02/24/why-the-gov-uk-design-system…
joelanman · 2022-06-16
we have a blog post on why:
https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2020/02/24/why-the-gov-uk-design-system…
arielserafini · 2021-02-11
there are issues with input type="number".
https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2020/02/24/why-the-gov-uk-design-system…
dmitriid · 2020-03-04
No. The question is: why can't every website be like gov.uk sites: with proper legibility, quick content, clearly designed and labeled for controls etc. [1-3]
Or things like BBC's Global Experience Language [4]
[1] Government Design Principles https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles
[2] gov.uk Design System https://design-system.service.gov.uk
[3] Or even tings like "Why the GOV.UK Design System team changed the input type for numbers" https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2020/02/24/why-the-gov-uk-design-system…
[4] https://bbc.github.io/gel/
masklinn · 2023-11-29
The musl remark is funny, because jemalloc's use of pretty fine-grained arenas sometimes leads to better memory utilisation through reduced fragmentation. For instance Aerospike couldn't fit in available memory under (admittedly old) glibc, and jemalloc fixed the issue: http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/3/17/in-memory-computing-at-aeros…
And this is not a one-off: https://hackernoon.com/reducing-rails-memory-use-on-amazon-linux-with-… https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2021/taming-memory-fragmentation…
jemalloc also has extensive observability / debugging capabilities, which can provide a useful global view of the system, it's been used to debug memleaks in JNI-bridge code: https://www.evanjones.ca/java-native-leak-bug.html https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2015/12/11/using-jemalloc-to-get-to-the…