custard doughnuts

I've written my ninth (?) blog post for GDS, titled How we retired a web application to make GOV.UK simpler to run.

It's a technical subject written for a non-technical audience, so hopefully it should make sense whatever your background.

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.

govuk-frontend 5.3 was recently released, containing a new Password Input component.

This is exciting news for two reasons. Firstly, because government websites now have a standard, tested and accessible way of allowing users to check their password inputs. And secondly, because I helped to build it.

More often than I'd like I encounter a bit of the internet that either isn't clear, isn't useful, or isn't working properly. Occasionally I get frustrated enough to write about it.

Star Citizen looks amazing. It's also exactly the sort of game I enjoy playing. But I'm not playing it. Why not? Because of their website.

More often than I'd like I encounter a bit of the internet that either isn't clear, isn't useful, or isn't working properly. Occasionally I get frustrated enough to write about it. This week: the Boots.com login page.

This one isn't entirely the fault of Boots. But it raises some interesting questions about how websites are maintained over time.

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.