Government Digital Services
Front-end Development
GDS aims to make digital government simpler, clearer and faster for everyone. GDS products and services are used by more than 13 million people each week, and are relied upon by more than 1,900 public sector organisations.
Details
| Client | Government Digital Services |
|---|---|
| Year | 2022 |
| Duration | 2+ years |
| Tools & Tech | HTML, CSS, Sass, JS, Aria, SVG, Git, Ruby on Rails |
| Output | Front-end code, A/B tests, Prototypes, Documentation |
| URL | www.gov.uk |
Summary
I joined GDS in April 2022 as a frontend developer. This was the first time I’d worked fully remote for a new employer, and the first time working with a new team through video meetings. But it didn’t take long to get into this new way of working and start to make contributions.
As a frontend developer working on the gov.uk website, I’ve had to learn a ton of new things. The site is complex, comprised of many different apps that render different parts of the site. The pages themselves are built from components that come from a central components gem (the tech stack uses Ruby on Rails), and the components gem in turn uses patterns developed and maintained by Design System team. It’s a complex beast that takes a lot of understanding and I now know enough to be able to work on the frontend elements of most of the site.
Current work
I’m currently involved in a large piece of work to deprecate small font sizes on the site. All the mobile font sizes are being increased to be more readable, and there are tweaks to some of the larger heading sizes.
It’s been a complex task to assess all the rendering apps and update them to reflect the new font sizes. There are edge cases and exceptions and making sure that every piece of text is the right size is a huge task. It’s not easy to maintain a code base that’s over a decade old and keep it consistent and we’re discovering many strange quirks. But I’m confident that once we’re done, the site will have the new consistent font sizes throughout and will be much easier to read on mobile.
Previous work
Other work that I’ve done since I joined:
- Creation and maintenance of the Cost of Living support pages.
- Updates to the Prime Minister’s Office page.
- Improvements to the new homepage.
- Improvements to the accessibility of the global header.
- Improvements to the global feedback component on every page, which replaces some legacy float-based layout with flexbox.
- Fixes for the grid layout on the Browse Topics pages.
- Improvements to myriad components as part of ongoing maintenance.