custard doughnuts

One of the biggest challenges of software development is doing things at scale. A simple website with few pages can be built from scratch and be online in a few hours. A website that serves hundreds of thousands of pages to millions of visitors every day is a much more complicated challenge.

This is a story I wrote several years ago about some work I did on GOV.UK. It's about architecture, technical debt and planning ahead. It's also about some very specific JavaScript problems that I had to solve.

When I started working with Google Analytics 4, even the basics of how it fits together were hard to understand. Since we're all being forced to upgrade soon, here's the contents of my brain in case it's useful to other developers.

I don't consider myself an authority on any of this, but it might be helpful.

I've co-authored a new blog post for GDS, titled How GOV.UK is upgrading to Google Analytics 4. Read on for a bit of background.

I've had another article published on the GDS blog - Rebuilding the scroll tracker on GOV.UK. This one's been a while in the making.