6 items tagged “gov-uk”
2024
Reckoning. Alex Russell is a self-confessed Cassandra - doomed to speak truth that the wider Web industry stubbornly ignores. With this latest series of posts he is spitting fire.
The series is an "investigation into JavaScript-first frontend culture and how it broke US public services", in four parts.
In Part 2 — Object Lesson Alex profiles BenefitsCal, the California state portal for accessing SNAP food benefits (aka "food stamps"). On a 9Mbps connection, as can be expected in rural parts of California with populations most likely to need these services, the site takes 29.5 seconds to become usefully interactive, fetching more than 20MB of JavaScript (which isn't even correctly compressed) for a giant SPA that incoroprates React, Vue, the AWS JavaScript SDK, six user-agent parsing libraries and a whole lot more.
It doesn't have to be like this! GetCalFresh.org, the Code for America alternative to BenefitsCal, becomes interactive after 4 seconds. Despite not being the "official" site it has driven nearly half of all signups for California benefits.
The fundamental problem here is the Web industry's obsession with SPAs and JavaScript-first development - techniques that make sense for a tiny fraction of applications (Alex calls out document editors, chat and videoconferencing and maps, geospatial, and BI visualisations as apppropriate applications) but massively increase the cost and complexity for the vast majority of sites - especially sites primarily used on mobile and that shouldn't expect lengthy session times or multiple repeat visits.
There's so much great, quotable content in here. Don't miss out on the footnotes, like this one:
The JavaScript community's omertà regarding the consistent failure of frontend frameworks to deliver reasonable results at acceptable cost is likely to be remembered as one of the most shameful aspects of frontend's lost decade.
Had the risks been prominently signposted, dozens of teams I've worked with personally could have avoided months of painful remediation, and hundreds more sites I've traced could have avoided material revenue losses.
Too many engineering leaders have found their teams beached and unproductive for no reason other than the JavaScript community's dedication to a marketing-over-results ethos of toxic positivity.
In Part 4 — The Way Out Alex recommends the gov.uk Service Manual as a guide for building civic Web services that avoid these traps, thanks to the policy described in their Building a resilient frontend using progressive enhancement document.
timpaul/form-extractor-prototype (via) Tim Paul, Head of Interaction Design at the UK's Government Digital Service, published this brilliant prototype built on top of Claude 3 Opus.
The video shows what it can do. Give it an image of a form and it will extract the form fields and use them to create a GDS-style multi-page interactive form, using their GOV.UK design system and govuk-frontend npm package.
It works for both hand-drawn napkin illustrations and images of existing paper forms.
The bulk of the prompting logic is the schema definition in data/extract-form-questions.json.
I'm always excited to see applications built on LLMs that go beyond the chatbot UI. This is a great example of exactly that.
2022
GOV.UK: Rules for getting production access (via) Fascinating piece of internal documentation on GOV.UK describing their rules, procedures and granted permissions for their deployment and administrative ops roles.
GOV.UK Guidance: Documenting APIs (via) Characteristically excellent guide from GOV.UK on writing great API documentation. “Task-based guidance helps users complete the most common integration tasks, based on the user needs from your research.”
2018
11 barriers to coding in the open and how to overcome them (via) “Terence Eden, open standards lead at GDS, also gave a talk about overcoming barriers to coding in the open”—an intriguing recap of that talk revealing exactly how the UK government have been encouraging a culture of coding in the open and going open source first.
2017
GOV.UK Registers (via) Canonical sources of “lists of information” intended for use by GDS teams building software for the UK government, but available for anyone. 17 registers are “ready for use”, 45 are “in progress”. Covers things like the FCO’s country list, the official list of prison estates, and DEFRA’s list of public bodies in England that manage drainage systems.