9 items tagged “government”
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.
NPM: modele-social (via) This is a fascinating open source package: it’s an NPM module containing an implementation of the rules for calculating social security contributions in France, maintained by a team at Urssaf, the not-quite-government organization in France that manages the collection of social security contributions there.
The rules themselves can be found in the associated GitHub repository, encoded in a YAML-like declarative language called Publicodes that was developed by the French government for this and similar purposes.
2022
Consistent with the practices outlined in SP 800-63B, agencies must remove password policies that require special characters and regular password rotation from all systems within one year of the issuance of this memorandum. These requirements have long been known to lead to weaker passwords in real-world use and should not be employed by the Federal Government.
— Memo: Moving the U.S. Government Toward Zero Trust Cybersecurity Principles
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.
2008
Government in the UK once lead the world in it's own information systems, breaking Enigma, documenting an empire's worth of trade. And then it fired everyone who could do those things, or employed them only via horribly expensive consultancies. It is time to start bringing them back into the corridors of power.
Video speech matching on TheyWorkForYou.com. Launched this morning at BarCamp London by Matthew Somerville—TheyWorkForYou now has video from BBC Parliament but they need your help matching it exactly to their transcripts from Hansard. Neat example of a game that helps process large amounts of data.
WhatDoTheyKnow (via) New from mySociety: a site for submitting and publically tracking Freedom of Information requests to the UK government.
FixMySpine. JP muses over what would happen if huge government IT contracts were handed to small, agile teams like MySociety instead of gargantuan IT consultancies. I’ve often wondered the same thing.
2007
OPSI asks users to contribute to new web channel. The Office of Public Sector Information now has an online forum for people interested in reusing UK government information for commercial benefit, based on a recommendation in the “Power of Information” report by Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo.