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Why are HTTP status codes so hard, and also we look at what Microsofts push to go carbon neutral really means and how individual people can implement small changes to have an impact on the environment.

Our 4th annual year-end wrap-up episode! We don’t naval gaze often, but when we do… we make sure you get your money’s worth. Reflections, most popular episodes, our favs, and new this year: listener voice mails. Thanks for listening! 💚

This week we’re joined by Nora Jones, founder and CEO at Jeli where they help teams gain insight and learnings from incidents. Back in December Nora shared here thoughts in a Changelog post titled “Incident” shouldn’t be a four-letter word - which got a lot of attention from our readers. Today we’re talking with Nora a...

Kelsey Hightower joins us from Google to discuss the question "Can DevSecOps be damaging?"

Gerhard loves simple ideas executed well, which is why he is excited to be speaking today with Ildar Iskhakov & Matvey Kukuy about their startup Amixr, a.k.a. Grafana OnCall. Ildar & Matvey started with a simple idea and a simple stack - Django, Celery, RabbitMQ & MySQL - all running on Kubernetes. Because ...

What’s the best way to criticise FOSS projects?       Subscribe to the RSS feed.

Listen to Episode 18 – Your Questions Answered and twenty-six more episodes by Starling Developer Podcast, free! No signup or install needed. Episode 27 - Ethics in technology. Episode 26 - Monolithic deployments.

Summary That’s right – I’m talking about Jenkins! I was put…More Like this:Like Loading... Related

Will work ever love us back? Two millennials disagree.

Phil, Mike, and Matt get together to talk about how to safely sunset and deprecate your API so you dont anger your team or outside API consumers.

Matt, Mike and Phil get back together after a wild summer vacay of drinks, sand, trees and getting hit by a car while out on a bike. We catch up with Phil and Stoplights efforts to reshape API Documentation as well as responsible OSS Community Involvement.

We’re prepping for our 4th annual state of the “log” episode where we look back at the year, discuss some of our favorite episodes as well as the most popular ones, and talk a bit about what we have in the works for 2022 and beyond. We thought it’d be awesome to include some listener voices on the show! So, please shar...

We've spoken in recent episodes about the volatility of the current job market, and how "The Great Resignation" is offering great opportunities for those who choose to change companies. But what about those who choose to stay? This week, we talk about the challenges of remaining motivated and thriving when those around you are moving on.  Next week, we're doing an epic All Stand-Up episode, where we'll be focusing entirely on what's going on in our working lives - and we'd love to hear from you! Drop us a message/DM on Twitter, or leave us a voice message - we'll try to incorporate as many into our episode as possible! TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Start 02:33 The Stand-Up 10:29 Social Engineering 16:17 This Week's Epic 33:50 News Bytes 37:30 The Wash-Up LINKS DISCUSSED THIS WEEK:  Ministry of Testing Cambridge: How Testers Can Shape The Next Normal Gizmodo: Star Trek: Discovery Is Lost to Most of the World Days Before Its Season 4 Premiere 9to5Google: You can now pre-order the 2nd-gen Pixel Stand from Google, ships next month BBC Sport: English cricket 'institutionally' racist - Rafiq Fawcett Society: The Fawcett Society announces date of Equal Pay Day 2021 BBC News: The day Iceland's women went on strike The Guardian: Genshin Impact players say Chinese game censors "Taiwan" and "Hong Kong" chat YouTube: "Let's Go Brandon" video New York Post: Peloton accused of banning anti-Biden "Let’s Go Brandon" on platform EuroNews: Portugal makes it illegal for your boss to text you after work in 'game changer' remote work law Amazon: Michael C. Feathers - Working Effectively with Legacy Code Martin Fowler: The strangler pattern Arria careers page (or reach out to Maribel Ayala on LinkedIn) The Guardian: Staying power! How to thrive in the great resignation if you don’t want to quit The Register: Thousands of Firefox users accidentally commit login cookies on GitHub 9to5Mac: Apple secretly buying ads for their apps, say big developers – and they aren’t happy about it ArsTechnica: Apple will finally let devs tell users about non-App Store purchase options Wikipedia: Epic Games v Apple

Solving complex problems with software is, unsurprisingly, complex in itself. But what can we do about it? We weigh up the pros and cons of microservices, containers and external libraries as we analyse whether we're guilty of exchanging short-term convenience for long-term headaches. Plus, there's a bonus mini-discussion during The Stand-Up about knowing when to change roles and how to negotiate salary changes. In a busy work week, there are plenty of extra-curricular distractions too, as Neil has Star Trek frustrations, Sanj finds an excuse to not shave, and Gwen makes the quickest ever U-turn on buying a piece of tech. TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Start 01:09 The Stand-Up 07:18 Social Engineering 13:14 This Week's Epic 23:27 News Bytes 31:31 The Wash Up LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK: Genshin Impact YouTube: Home Sweet Home Alone trailer InfoWorld: Complexity is killing software developers YouTube: Sam Newman & Martin Fowler - When To Use Microservices (And When Not To) The Verge: Microsoft Teams enters the metaverse race with 3D avatars and immersive meetings Wired: These Parents Built a School App. Then the City Called the Cops YouTube: Martin Sumner - Replacing the big NHS computer BBC News: Twitter poll calls on Elon Musk to sell 10% stake in Tesla CNBC: Elon Musk sells around $5 billion of Tesla stock Business Insider: Kimbal Musk cashed out $109 million of Tesla stock just before Elon's tweets whacked the share price

This week we’re joined by Lara Hogan – author of Resilient Management and management coach & trainer for the tech industry. Lara led engineering teams at Kickstarter and Etsy before she, and Deepa Subramaniam stepped away from their deep roots in the tech industry to start Wherewithall – a consultancy that helps le...

It’s easy to overlook documentation when building an application, but documentation can make or break a consumer’s experience. Today we’re diving into the world of documentation to discuss what it takes to write good documentation, the ethics of documentation, and some popular tools you can use to g

Rachel Tsang and Ross Ferguson share how the GOV.UK roadmap contributes to GDS’s mission of building a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. For those of you who tuned into last month’s episode, you’ll know that GDS has launched its new strategy centring around 5 core key missions:   GOV.UK as the single and trusted online destination for government information and services;   Joined-up services that solve whole problems and span multiple departments;   A simple digital identity solution that works for everyone;   Common tools and expert services;   and Joined-up data across departments.   Today I am joined by Rachel Tsang and Ross Ferguson from the leadership team of the GOV.UK programme to hear more about how their roadmap objectives are contributing to making GDS’s mission - of building a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone - a reality.   Ross, could you please introduce yourself?   Ross Ferguson: OK, thank you. So I'm Ross Ferguson and the Deputy Director for Portfolio Delivery within GOV.UK. And this is actually my second tour with GOV.UK. I started as an Associate Product Manager when GDS was first set up. GOV.UK was the first product that I worked on and I later worked as the Head of Product Management for GDS. And then after a little overseas tour, I was very pleased to return to GOV.UK in January and, yeah, very excited to be back and to be working with Rachel.   Vanessa Schneider: It's good to have you Ross. Thank you. Yes, Rachel, would you mind introducing yourself to the listeners, please?   Rachel Tsang: Of course. So my name is Rachel Tsang and I am Deputy Director for Governance and Assurance on GOV.UK. Like Ross, I am, I sort of boomeranged back to-to GOV.UK. So I was, I did a previous role and then stepped away to do something else. And I'm really, really thrilled. I think that's a, it's not a necessary condition to working on GOV.UK that you come back. I think it is testament to like just how much people enjoy working, working on GOV.UK. Before that, I so, I joined government as a Social Researcher and did a range of roles in different government departments and yeah, have settled here in GDS.   Vanessa Schneider: Thank you. So as mentioned at the top of the episode, the GDS strategy strongly relies on GOV.UK as outlined in GDS's first mission, which is to establish GOV.UK as the single and trusted online destination for government information and services. It'd be really great to hear from both of you how this mission influenced the update to the GOV.UK roadmap.   Rachel Tsang: So I think fundamentally our mission for GOV.UK is to provide a joined-up, personalised, and, and proactive service - we-we blogged lots about that recently. And we-we've evolved continuously since GOV.UK was first created in 2012. And what we're looking to do now is really a big step change in-in our offering for GOV.UK. Fundamentally, it's-it's about changing our offering to continually innovate to meet changing needs. I think that that is the crux for how we're feeding into the wider GDS strategy and vision.   Ross Ferguson: Yeah, absolutely. I think departments, GDS with GOV.UK and, you know, spend control standards alongside departments has done a really, really good job over the years of bringing services that were previously paper-based and office-based, online. And a lot of them are really great in isolation. But we know that the people who use GOV.UK don't experience them, don't want them in isolation. They don't, it's not a nicely compartmentalised linear process. You know, they-they want them in combination. So really, the next maturity step for Government Digital has to be that these services are joined up. Which means that departments need to coordinate with one another.   GDS is in a great position and GOV.UK is a great platform for, for enabling that join-up to happen in a coordinating sense but also in in a public experience sense: that there is one domain that the public knows they can go to to get the guidance, to get access to the services. And, you know, that's what they would expect in all other walks of life when they're transacting with lots of, you know, utilities and and and entertainment. So it's perfectly reasonable that they should expect that from government, and government is perfectly capable of doing it. So that's work that we want to really accelerate this year. And, you know, it is a big undertaking. So it's something that will continue in the, in the years to come.   Vanessa Schneider: Yes, speaking of joined-up services, I'd like you to listen to a couple of interviews that we recorded with colleagues in the different GOV.UK teams that are working towards the objectives of the roadmap. So first we’ll actually be hearing from Tina Mermiri, who shares about the work done to connect insights across GOV.UK to enable those joined up services. This is so that government understands its users and users understand the government.   [Start of vox pop]   Tina Mermiri: I'm Tina Mermiri, the Head of User and Data Insight for GOV.UK. I set out the data and the insight strategy for the programme, and I oversee all the work within data science, performance analytics and user research. So as a team of experts, we have 3 wider objectives and that's understanding GOV.UK users and their needs; that's facilitating data-driven decision-making internally and across wider government; and it's also monitoring the impact of the work that we deliver and the products that we ship. So with performance analytics, we're looking at how people, or users engage with the site, what content they're engaging with and how we can optimise their journeys.    Then we complement that with the user research to understand what their issues are. We get feedback from them. We're actually looking at why they're trying to do certain things that are, that are failing and how we can optimise those journeys as well. And so what the data science community does is go into a little bit more detail with some of the more complicated techniques whereby we might want to look at some of the data that we've got behind the scenes and create some models and scores and look at something like related links and surface them on the site for users that have done something similar to other users and make their journeys easier. So it's all going back to optimising the journey, making it as smooth and frictionless as possible with the power of data behind that.   We're using Google Analytics to power a lot of this data. And Google Analytics has a cookie consent. So we will only track people who have opted in to tracking, which means that our data is not 100 percent representative of all our users, but it's pretty indicative of what they'll be doing. It also means that we hash out any personally identifiable information. We don't actually track that and don't use it for any of our analysis. And we've worked really, really closely with the privacy team to make sure that, you know, privacy is at the heart of all the tracking that we do and all the consequent analysis that we conduct around it. So personalisation, the way that we're looking at it is two-fold. On the one hand, it is without any personally identifiable information. So it is just looking at common journeys and similar content that's being consumed by different users at aggregate level. So that's the one way of doing it where we don't collect any other personal information and we don't personalise it based on their background or any of the demographics, we don't even track that right now. But it is about that journey and other similar journeys. And then on the flip side, we will eventually be trying to do a little bit more personalisation based on people who hold accounts with us, where they will, again, share some of their information with us as part of their account. And that is information that they will have opted into as well. And we will hopefully use that to personalise further, based on, based on their location, for example, and other similar attributes that we want to start building on.    The nature of the data that we collect and making sure that that's representative is, is very, very important. So we could do a lot of really clever stuff with it. But if it's not in a good place, then the output-- if the inputs aren't reliable, necessary, then the outputs won't be as reliable either. So we're spending a lot of time on revisiting the way that we collect some of the data, the way that we cleanse the data, the way we make sure that it is reliable and ready for us to use. So that's one thing that we're investing in quite heavily. And we need to make sure that we're asking the right questions without, like, probing, leading wording. We need to make sure that we're able to differentiate between attitudes around, let's say, GOV.UK or what they're trying to do and wider government. We need to make sure that our data is representative across all our very, very wide range and diverse users.   I think the work that we're trying to do and the opportunities that it opens up for users and to make their journeys easier is, is, is really impressive.   [End of vox pop]   Ross Ferguson:  Tina's a...and her crew, you know, clearly, clearly know what they're talking about. She was, she was giving great insights there into, you know, just how important the data usage is going to be to powering the sort of whole journeys work that we’re wanting to do, the personalisation. It's all, it's all dependent on us making, you know, proper, proper use of that, of that data. I think that she, you know, she did talk well about the tooling that we're starting to bring in to help us with that. We are, we're definitely stepping up the recruitment that we do of-of these data disciplines. And, you know, and I think it's about bringing our, the, the data scientists and engineers that we have already and have had for a while much more closer into the work with the with the team so that they're they're kind of doing less reporting and they're doing more in terms of the tactics and the and the strategy work.   Rachel Tsang:  On the objective to connect insights, I'm not sure we're allowed to have favourites, but this one is-is really, really important to me because I think it really goes back to the heart of why GOV.UK was first created. Right? You think about the world before 2012, where there are almost 2,000 websites, and you needed to understand the structures of government to interact with it. And so we've come a long way. But fundamentally, the way that we analyse and approach problems remain siloed by departmental boundaries. So you know, the work that we are looking to do over the next year to join up those insights, to be able to understand aggregate trends and patterns, that's super important, not just for GOV.UK like in helping us to improve the product, but for the rest of government more generally in terms of how we approach a much wider whole user journeys.   Vanessa Schneider: And I guess as with any insights, what’s important is what you use them to enable. I think it’s time to hear from Daisy Wain, one of our Lead Performance Analysts, about what we’re doing to translate insights into a more personalised and proactive service for users.   [Start of vox pop]   Daisy Wain: My name is Daisy. I'm the Lead Performance Analyst on GOV.UK. It's my job to make sure that we are at the cutting edge of analytical technologies and practises to make sure that we're aligned with what the latest developments are and to make sure that they're fit for purpose, for what we want on GOV.UK that obviously has a strong focus around privacy and security.   So one of the things that we've been doing is doing a cross-government data commission. So it's been working as a small team to find out all the different transactional services there are in government, what data attributes they all collect, and if they have an account that's associated with that transactional service. And if they do, how many accounts there are, and all that sort of thing. And obviously what that allows us to think about then is how we can use that data to be proactive. So, for example, if we were to have, if we were able to know somebody's postcode or to know their date of birth, we can then start to infer things about them. So that means we can proactively show them things on GOV.UK that are specific. So, for example, we know you live in Scotland, we can show you the Scottish content first and foremost, as opposed to the English. What else we can do is obviously helping the product teams to deliver the first trial of the account. So that was what we did on the Brexit checker. So that was the product where any person could go through a series of questions related to their personal circumstances around, you know, where they live, what their nationality is, what their plans are for business and for travel, and what the output is, is a series of actions that you may need to take related to the changes related to Brexit. And the account allows you to store that information, to revisit it and to get notifications of when that might change. The job as an analyst is to look at how people are using that thing so we can look at the sign-up journey to see perhaps where certain steps might not be working as well. And then that starts to help us build a picture about the types of people that would like to use this account and where the value is.   I think it's important for us to think about developing this, like, next generation of GOV.UK and how people interact with government and government services. But it can't be designed just for people that want that. We have to consider people that would not want to opt into that world and to make sure that we are still designing things that allow people to not have to consent, but still have that optimised journey based on the data that we have available on those people, which is non-consented, kind of basic, so from the server. Obviously this is an important aspect for people that don't want to have that universal government sign-in, which is completely, completely within a user's discretion. So from an analytical perspective is, what can we learn about your behaviour on GOV.UK that allows us then to personalise your experience and even be proactive. It could be that you have the option to save some of your preferences. So there's things that we can start to do, which is purely based on your behaviour on GOV.UK that we can say, “hey, we think this might be useful for you” purely based on this behaviour, and then you can opt in to say, “actually yeah, that's handy. I want that to happen. I want that to persist”. Or you can equally say, “no, I'm not interested. I just want it to be, I want to be completely anonymous”.    I also think that some of the biggest hurdles around this is making sure that users’ experience reflects the reality on GOV.UK. There is an expectation, I think, around - for some users - that government is government and everything is joined-up behind the scenes. And there is a confusion around “why do I have to tell my, the tax service my personal details and I have to tell the-- things related to my vehicle, the same details. Why are they not joined up? Also, why can't I sign into this thing and do the other thing?” So the hardest thing is like how can we build something that has those privacy concerns at the centre, but also then reflects users’ expectation of how to, how to interact with government. Meeting those expectations but from our perspective of delivering it, it's how can we do that kind of crosscutting, bringing all of government services, different departments together, creating this kind of, almost this single sign-on vision, which is what we're hoping to achieve in the long term, where you only have to do things once. But how you do that is very, very challenging. The front, the front of it looks simple. The underneath is horribly complicated.   [End of vox pop]   Vanessa Schneider:  I think one of the areas that really impressed me was how much collaboration there is across government on it. And essentially that you've got this buy-in on this objective through the commission.   Rachel Tsang: Definitely. I think we were saying before, this isn't just a project for GDS or for GOV.UK, right. It-it only really, really works, and you only get the real value for users if you're enabling that cross government collaboration. And to be honest, that-that is tricky because departments don't necessarily always have the same priorities; there, there is a lot of stuff that is happening across government. But I think we all have the shared objective of fundamentally making things better for our users. And I think the extent to which this is driven by data and driven by insight is incredibly powerful, right? Because it's all very much evidence-led and led by what is going to make a difference to meeting user needs.   Vanessa Schneider:  Definitely, and I think, again,Daisy also reiterated something that Ross mentioned before at the very beginning, actually, about how the user perception of GOV.UK isn't that there are these separations between the different departments, that it is just the monolith of government and how we're really trying to make that perception of reality. I was just wondering if you had any more reflections on that, Ross.   Ross Ferguson: I think that GOV.UK makes it possible to engage with and transact with government as-as one thing, if-if that's helpful to you as the, as the user. But it is also possible to say you're a-a particular-an academic or maybe a business user - there are you know, we also do cater for those more specialist journeys through, through government as well. I think that's one of the things that GOV.UK has over the years put a lot of effort into, listened to a lot of user feedback, made use of the data that we have had to get that to get that right. And so I, you know, I like what Daisy was pointing out there that: when we're thinking about personalisation, we're thinking about it like, you know, individual needs and that somebody might be operating, coming, coming to GOV.UK, as you know, a private citizen, but they might also be a business owner. And, you know, we-we-we want to be able to-to cater for those different sorts of profiles that one person could-could have. And, you know, and that's what we, that's what we do well. We--is the care and attention we pour into these kinds of nuances, these-these complexities. These--Daisy's right to say that it's-it's complex. That's what we love. That's what we're here for. That's what every person on GOV.UK is here for, you know, to-to do that hard work to-to make, to make the things as simple as people need it to be for their circumstances.   Vanessa Schneider: And it's also beautiful how you're working at it from both ends, whether somebody wants to fully connect all of their personal information that government holds, make sure that everything is bespoke to them, or if somebody prefers to really just have that interaction standing on its own, and just as they need to be in touch with government, they'll handle it on a case by case basis and and just sort of like be shepherded down the right path without government necessarily knowing everything about them.   Ross Ferguson: Yeah, I think that there is so much that we can do with all the data that we generate automatically through, through our logs and that we've gathered over the over the years and that we can analyse very quickly to be able to make pretty good bets about other information on GOV.UK, other services that would be of interest to you based on the patterns of usage in a given session. Which is, you know, very unintrusive. And, you know, I think that there's lots that we can do without people telling us lots of attributes about themselves and having to sign up to things - that will always be at the core of GOV.UK. However the account is very exciting because it will put the user in the position of being able to say, to build up a profile for themselves and be able to choose how they then use that, and that will just make government work so much harder for the public.  And I think that that is maybe a little bit of, has been a pipedream for many for many years, but it's a reality that we can that we are delivering now, that will start to see come to fruition over the next year. And I think the public will be really excited about that and it will help make government more efficient. And so I think that's-that's something that everybody wins from. And really, you know, the teams are excited about that, not just the account team, but all--that's one of the good things about what I'm seeing on GOV.UK is the way that the teams are working alongside one another. There are data insights teams that have been really proactive about how they get in touch with our team that's working on starting and sustaining a business journey. They're saying to the accounts team “look we could, we could really benefit from this functionality, this feature, can we share data on this”. Vanessa Schneider: We obviously need a really solid foundation for all of this work, so I guess that’s why our objective to ensure GOV.UK is always available, accessible and accurate is so important. Let’s hear from Kati now on what’s happening in that area.   [Start of vox pop]   Kati Tirbhowan:  I’m Kati Tirbhowan, I’m a senior content designer in the GOV.UK Explore team. Our team is working on making GOV.UK easier to navigate and we’re currently working on ideas that include improvements to the site-wide navigation, mobile experience on the site, page-level navigation elements, so things like how the breadcrumbs and related links work on the site.   In our team we run multiple rounds of user research to improve our designs and we're doing research with different types of users. That's people who come to GOV.UK for different reasons to do different things. And within those groups, we're also including users who might have low digital confidence or skills or access needs, for example. And then each discipline brings their expertise to make content accessible. So that's from design to developers, to content design. And for content design, for example, we've got our content guidance that includes an accessibility checklist that we use to design and review content changes as part of our regular work on the site.    And in our team we've also just done some accessibility testing on the new site-wide main menu design, which is one of the ideas we're working on. And to do the testing we used accessibility personas the GDS accessibility team have created and those personas are really helpful and an engaging way of raising awareness and understanding of accessibility. And from that, we identified some improvements we can make to the design and we'll continue using those personas to test our work as we go on. Um we’re also optimise-- mobile-optimising the pages and components that we're working on. So they feel like they're designed with mobile in mind, and that includes things like expanding the touch target. So the area you need to tap on to follow a link so that they're larger and easier to use, um especially for people who have a tremor or a long term impairment, for example.    I think one challenge is the size of GOV.UK. It's a huge and varied site, with many different types of content, and GOV.UK provides the route to hundreds of government services operated by departments, as well as the guidance published by every department. You also have a lot of people looking for information and services to do important things in their lives. And that means for us it's critical that people can find what they need quickly and as easily as possible. And it really is the hard work of all the teams and all the different disciplines and all the talent that makes it happen.    And one of our design principles is “do the hard work to make it simple”. And I think people are really passionate about this and care about making things work for users the best we can. And I feel like this is a big part of it, making it such a great place to work too. We can help to make a real difference.   [End of vox pop]   Ross Ferguson:  I might point to this one as being one of my one of the areas I care about the-the most. I think getting the basics right is so foundational to the innovation that we might want to put on top of that. It's really important that GOV.UK is there in times of need for people. It has to be reliable. And it's the sort of site that you go to when you're not sure if the internet's working properly, you can go to GOV.UK to see well, if GOV.UK's up then it's and then everything's all right. So we do put a lot of stock in making sure it's reliable, that it's secure, that it's performing quickly and smoothly for people.   And, yes, that-that would--includes how our search and navigation works, how our-our pages help people to find their way around the information services and through it. And so, yeah, we've got some-some pretty major changes taking place to the navigation on GOV.UK planned. That starts with a test, of course, because we like to, you know, to test with users before we go, you know, rolling this out to everybody. We will do some multivariate, or A/B testing, with a proportion of our users on GOV.UK, who will see the site in slightly different ways: so the menu bar at the top will have some, some new options in there. And through the early testing that we've already done, we're pretty confident that's going to help people to find information quicker and then to find other related information if they, if they need it.   A lot of people will want to come to GOV.UK, get the thing that they're after and then get going. But some people will want an ongoing journey. And so this new navigation bar helps people to understand where things are and how things relate to one another. And then later on in this year, that same team, well obviously they'll continue improving that that nav, but they will also then be working on the homepage, which, you know I suppose, it's a kind of a cliche that people say, well, Google is the homepage, but actually, you know, really you know, a lot of people it's actually one of our it's like our top page is the homepage - lots of people go there. And so it can work harder, we think, helping people to understand what's timely, you know relative to events that are taking place in society, maybe or maybe because they've given us, they've signed up to an account and they want maybe a more personalised experience. So we're going to start with some changes to the homepage, which make it clearer what's, what's available and what's timely. And so these will be really two of the biggest changes to the design of GOV.UK, really since-since its launch in 2012. And so we're obviously a little bit excited about those.   Rachel Tsang: Yeah, definitely. So I think fundamentally it all starts with this, right? We support millions of users every day. And to be able to do that effectively, we need the platform, we need the information and services on it being reliable, resilient and secure. You can't have accounts and personalisation without this fundamental infrastructure. And-and so it's super duper important. And I think it also touches on something that's been implicit to what we've been discussing throughout, which is about retaining user trust. And that is inherent in how we need to build the account, that's inherent in how we do personalisation, but it's also inherent in just being available, accessible and accurate.    And you know, we think about the sort of the premise of the work that we're doing now to increasingly personalised GOV.UK, right? We start from the premise of like, well, people's expectations have changed. They think about how they interact with you know, like Citymapper or with Netflix. And-and so our premise is that why should, why should the user experience of interacting with government be any different? That's the starting premise, but for us, it--trust takes on an extra important angle, and this is where having that infrastructure of content, of the platform, of availability is so, so important.   Vanessa Schneider: You're so right, you're so right. But, yeah, obviously what's coming through through all of this is really that it's all about iteration. I mean, trying out new concepts is a part of iteration, isn't it? Like GOV.UK accounts is building on things that already exist. But one of the bigger questions really is the: how everything that we're doing right now supports what the rest of government is doing. So we talked with Anna Sherrington, who is working on that objective within the GOV.UK team.   [Start of vox pop]   Anna Sherrington: Hi, my name is Anna Sherrington and I'm the Lead Delivery Manager at GOV.UK and I'm responsible for supporting the government priorities of the day objective. What that means in practise is that I work with a number of multidisciplinary, highly-skilled teams to ensure that GOV.UK is responsive to the issues of the day and that we are the source of the government is saying and doing and what it means for people day to day.  So there are 4 teams working on this objective at the moment, 2 are concentrating on coronavirus, 1 on Brexit and 1 on starting a business. This means we have around 60 people working on this objective. At the height of the pandemic, we had more people covering our coronavirus work and the team structure has been changing as the situation with the pandemic has developed. For example, last spring and autumn when things were very busy, we had a weekend and late evening support rota in place in order to support any updates as they happened. And although we don't have these rotas anymore, we still have the flexibility and the teams to support plans. So we have really adapted to changing needs for this objective. I feel very fortunate to be working with the teams I’m working with and very proud of the work we do every day. There's a very supportive culture within the teams and we have made it our priority to build resilience and flexibility with everyone's wellbeing at the forefront of our minds. And this has been crucial.   [End of vox pop]   Vanessa Schneider:  A lot has been achieved in the past year first of all, and it's important to recognise that. We've really managed to-to sort of scale up in a way that we are resilient.   Rachel Tsang:  Talking about resilience and being able to meet the government's priorities of the day, I would completely agree with you, like it's been an extraordinary 18 months and it's super important that GOV.UK is, as the online home for government, is able to be able to be comprehensive and responsive to provide support for the government's critical priorities of the day. For-for the past 18 months, that's been Coronavirus and Brexit. And we've seen som,e we've seen some record levels of traffic. So I think during the pandemic we reached a peak of it was around 42 million page views at our daily peak. And that that is truly extraordinary, thinking about how the value and the importance of GOV.UK has grown over time. And I think what the last 12 to 18 months has shown us has really been the value of the value of GOV.UK as this critical source of truth, the value of collaborating across government, we've already talked about that, and the value of making sure that we're providing that trusted, accurate information and support to the millions of people that are relying on GOV.UK.   Ross Ferguson: I am not surprised that given that people on GOV.UK are the sorts of people who will care about pixel widths on things like hover states and, you know, and and and punctuation to almost the pedantic degree - but I would never say that - that come, you know, a national, you know, emergency, an unprecedented event for for the UK and the world, that those people would rise to the occasion. You know, nobody wants a pandemic but thank goodness we had GOV.UK as a place that, you know, the civil servants, and GDS, GOV.UK and then across the government could all use to collaborate with one another in the creation and curation of guidance and services very, very swiftly. But also, you know, and then the public could be given a really clear steer on where they could go.    And so I think that it's been interesting looking at the usage patterns we see, yes, an increase in the number of people overall coming to GOV.UK, but, you know, an increase in the regularity of those visits. So I think that that cross government collaboration that we saw come to the fore during the intense COVID period, paid off. And actually I think that it's, although we are glad that there's not the same urgency, I think that focus on collaboration does need to continue on now for and lots of aspects of running government, but particularly in that digital space where we're, we're good in the UK at digital government, but we're still not meeting our full potential. And so I think if we can keep that focus on-on good public services online, across government collaboration, I think that they, I'm very optimistic about the future for-for the digital government here, here in the UK.   We want to be doing more and we want to be doing better. And because that's what people here in the UK want us to do, and I think, you know, where you mentioned our, our blogs, podcasts, our code is all open. And we you know, we do, we share this so that our peers and other governments internationally also at the local level here in the UK can, you know, can can benefit from that and that we can benefit from their feedback and their scrutiny as well. I think that's-that's one of the things that I think the GOV.UK, GDS, UK dig-government digital does really, really well that that openness, that willingness to share and that drive to keep-keep doing better. And I think that that's what and that's what that gets me really motivated.   Vanessa Schneider: We have now come to our final objective, is: be channel agnostic. So personally, I know we've done fantastic work in collaboration with third parties like search engines in order to link content outside of the confines of the website itself. I was just wondering, maybe Rachel, you can tell us about how such partnerships came about and how this has changed things for users.   Rachel Tsang: Definitely. So I think we, unsurprisingly, are huge fans of-of collaborating. You mentioned that we've done some good work recently with Google to make sure that more GOV.UK content is available through-through rich search results. We also did some good work on the recent local elections as well. And so I think we start from the premise of wanting to collaborate and to think about how we can make more of our content more available.    I think the broader objective on being channel agnostic, I mean, we know that users are increasingly accessing information through other channels. Right? Search engines or voice assistance and-and so on. I think we also know that in May of this year, it was around 67% of our users that were accessing GOV.UK on mobile. And we see that number increasing year on year. So the work that we've done so far is good. We're-we're responding to changes in user behaviour where possible. But this objective for this year is really about enabling that step change. So through coronavirus, all of our services were designed as mobile-first. But what we need to keep pace with technology. So this is thinking about exactly to your question, designing for provision for access to-to GOV.UK information and services beyond the website. And that's yeah, super exciting because I think it's-it's keeping it's keeping pace with the user needs and changing user behaviour. It highlights how the 5 objectives that we have for our roadmap for the year, they're not, there's a huge amount of interdependency there. Right. We started out with the fundamental building blocks of being available, accessible, accurate. We build on with like supporting priorities of the day. We talk about personalisation. We talk about being channel agnostic. You put all of that together and like holistically that is about GOV.UK and enabling users to access information about government and services in a way that is tailor, that is personalised, that suits their needs.  Ross Ferguson: GOV.UK's getting close to being one of the top five, most used to most visited sites in the, in the U.K., and it goes up that-that list every-every year. And so I think that people will always value there being a site that they can go to or certainly they will value that for-for many, many years yet. There have to be other other channels that you are able to benefit from the information and parts also the services that are on the GOV.UK platform. And because, again, you might not know that you you could benefit from that information and other services, other parties might usefully be able to suggest, OK, actually you need you need to know this from the government or actually at this stage in your transaction with us, actually government can is the best place to help you with this.    And so I think that we want to explore those and call them partnerships, those and those crossover's a bit a bit more. Yes with some big household name technology companies, but also with groups that are involved in civil society. And this could be a national, it could be at a local level as well, and they are providing great support and services to-to their and their constituents, their members, their-their users. So I think there's a lot that we can do there.    I think what cuts across all of these, whether you're using a voice assistant more, you're perhaps engaging with some citizens advice and service or information on BBC is that you want to know that that information from the government is-is-is quality, is reliable. And so I think that that's where the GOV.UK verification, the GOV.UK brand, if you like, can really, really be useful there. And that is new ground for us. It's exciting perhaps to be--have a presence off of our own domain. And, you know, you mentioned we've been talking about trust earlier on, whatever we do in this space has to be underpinned by trust. And to get that right, we'll do experimenting and we will, we will talk to users because that is what we've always done. And that will keep us right.   Vanessa Schneider: So before we start to wrap up, I was wondering, what are you most excited for on this journey? Let's start with Ross.   Ross Ferguson:  That's a tough, that's a tough question. I-I am excited to see what the, what the response to the account will be. I'll be interested to see the way when we--as we roll out across the whole of GOV.UK this year and how people will respond to that, whether they will see it as a good utility. I'm anticipating the feedback, anticipating it being positive. What-what I'm looking forward to most is, is the detail about what more it could do and about how it should interact with services. I think that will give us a lot to go on.   Vanessa Schneider: Thank you Ross. Same question to you, Rachel please.   Rachel Tsang:  I think for me this is going to sound incredibly broad, but I think it's the energy around the delivery that we're doing right now. Like, we've got a really clear vision and direction and we've blogged and can I say podcasted? We've podcasted about it. And I think having that honesty and clarity about what we're doing and being really open about it is super important. Right. And I think that buzz is we're-we're kind of generating that buzz out externally.   But it is also very, very much with the team that's delivering on GOV.UK. And that's super exciting. And-and we can, I--can I talk about recruitment? Because I know we're very, very, very keen for lots more people to join GOV.UK. And we've got super exciting vision. We've got a clear direction of travel. So we are recruiting lots and lots of different roles. So user researchers, data scientists, product delivery, design, technology. I would say, particularly in the technology space as we design the architecture we talked about we platforming earlier on and so worthwhile having a look at the GDS career site to see our live roles, have a look at the blog. Ross and I, we published a blog post on four tips for applying for a job on GOV.UK. And we're hiring with a particular focus on our Manchester hub. Indeed, both in--both Ross and I are based up North.   The only thing I would add with that: this is actually really exciting, I think this is important to both Ross and I is that we are investing in junior roles, right. We want to build our-our pipeline of talent and invest in the development of people. So I would say that this isn't just about recruiting at a senior level. We're looking at all sorts of roles and all sorts of levels. So please do come join us.   Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you to both of you for joining us today on the podcast, and thank you also to all of your colleagues who joined us to share their contributions to the GOV.UK Roadmap objectives.   As a reminder, we are currently recruiting across GDS, and quite extensively for the GOV.UK programme. So we invite you to look at our vacancies and apply if you’re interested in any of the opportunities.    You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean.   Goodbye.   Rachel Tsang: Bye.   Ross Ferguson:  Thank you very much. Goodbye. 

Wondered how to migrate a 24/7 product to a serverless platform? We chat about initial user research, developing DevOps skills and the benefits of GDS's approach to this type of tech project.   --------- The transcript of the episode follows: Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today, I am joined by Jonathan Harden, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, and Kat Stevens, Senior Developer and co-Tech Lead on GOV.UK Pay.   GDS has many products that rely on our expert site reliability engineers and their colleagues to maintain and improve their functionality. Such as GOV.UK Pay - one of GDS’s common platforms that is used by more than 200 organisations across the UK public sector to take and process online payments from service users. Jonathan and Kat recently completed a crucial reliability engineering project to ensure that GOV.UK Pay continues to operate at the highest standards and provide a reliable service for public sector users and their service users.    We'll hear more about that in a moment, but to start off, can you please introduce yourself to our listeners? Kat, would you mind starting?   Kat Stevens:  Hi I'm Kat Stevens, I’m a Senior Developer on GOV.UK Pay. I've been working at GDS since 2017. And before that, I was a developer at start-ups and small companies.   As a co-Tech Lead on the migration team then, I'm kind of jointly responsible for making sure that our platform is running as it should be. That our team is working well together, that we're working on the right things and that we're, what we're working on is of a high quality, and is delivering value for our users. So it's like balancing that up with software engineering, making sure that you know, that we're being compliant. It's very important for Pay.  Software [laughs] engineering is so broad: there's like security, reliability, performance, all of those things. So yeah, it's kind of thinking about everything and---at a high level.   Vanessa Schneider:  I'm glad somebody's got a high level overview. Thanks, Kat. Jonathan, would you mind introducing yourself too?   Jonathan Harden:  Hi, I'm Jonathan Harden, and I am Senior Site Reliability Engineer on GOV.UK Pay. I've previously worked for a major UK mobile network operator, in the movie industry and for one of the UK's highest rated ISPs.   So all of GOV.UK Pay's services run, have to run somewhere. Being a Site Reliability Engineer means that I'm helping to build the infrastructure on which it runs, ensure that it is operating correctly and that we keep users’ cardholder data safe and help the developers ease their development lifecycle into getting updates and changes out into the world.   Vanessa Schneider:  Hmm..exciting work. So you both worked on a site reliability project for GOV.UK Pay. Can you please, for the uninitiated, introduce our listeners to the project that you carried out?   Kat Stevens:  Yeah so recently, we finished migrating GOV.UK Pay to run on AWS Fargate. So previously Pay was running its applications on ECS EC2 instances on AWS. That's a lot of acronyms. But it basically means we were maintaining long-lived EC2 instances that were running our applications. And that incurred quite a high maintenance burden for the developers on our team. And we decided that we wanted to move to a serverless platform to kind of reduce that maintenance burden. And after researching a few options, we decided that Fargate was a good fit for Pay, and we spent a few months carefully moving our apps across to the Fargate platform whilst not having any downtime for our users, which is obviously quite important. Like Pay is a 24/7 service, so we wanted to make sure that our end users had no idea that this was happening.   Vanessa Schneider:  Jonathan, how did you contribute to this migration?   Jonathan Harden:  So obviously, I've only been here for three months, so and the project has been going on quite a lot longer than that. But this is the kind of task I've been involved with, uh, several times now in the last few years at different companies. And so when I joined GDS, it was suggested that I join this project on Pay because I'd be able to contribute really quickly and, and help with the kind of the, the long tail of this migration.   So a-anybody else that's been in an SR- that works in SRE capacity will know that when you do these kind of projects, you have like the bulk of the migration where you move your applications, like your frontend services that users actually see when they go to the website and the backend services that processes transactions. But then you also have a lot of supporting services around that. So you have services like: things that provide monitoring and alerting, infrastructure that provides where, where do these applications get stored when they're not in use and like where do you launch them from. And there was, there was still quite a bit of that to tie up at the end. And the team, it's quite a small team. As a lot of SRE and infrastructure teams do tend to be. And so when I started, I joined that team and I've been helping with the, the, these long tail parts of the migration. Like in a lot of software engineering, the bulk of the work is done very quickly and the long tail takes quite a bit of time. So, so that's the kind of work that I've been helping with in the last few months.   Vanessa Schneider:  Great. Kat, as co-Tech Lead, what was your involvement in the migration?   Kat Stevens:  Let’s see where to start. So when I joined the Pay Team, which was around October  2020, we were in the early stages of the, of the project, so we'd made the decision that we needed to migrate and that involved things like analysing, like co-cost benefit things. I-It doesn't sound that exciting, but it was actually quite cool looking at all the different options. So, for example, it meant that we could keep some of our existing infrastructure. We wouldn't have to move our RDS instances for, for example. We could keep our existing security group, subnets - all that kind of glue that holds all the application, like infrastructure together.    Then there was quite a lot of planning of how we would actually do this, how we would roll out the migration application by application. We've got around a dozen microservices that we were going to move one by one. And figuring out what good looked like. How would we know that the migration is successful. How do we know whether to roll back a particular app.   So for the actual rollout of migrating sort of one application from EC2 to Fargate: we basically did DNS weighting. So we could have both run--versions of the app running alongside each other, and then you can have 5% of the traffic going to new apps, 95% to the old app. And you can gradually switch over that weighting and monitor whether there are any errors, whether like the traffic suddenly dips and things aren't getting through. So that was all part of the plannings. Like what, what stages would we reach to say like, that yes, we're confident that this change has been positive. And like having a whole, like overview view of what's happening when. Estimating things as well - that's alway, always pretty, [laughs] pretty difficult. But we, as the more apps we did, the quicker we went and we sped up on that. So that was good.   And yeah, there's a whole bunch of other things we, we had to get involved with over the last few months as well. So that's things like performance-testing the whole environment to, you know, we wanted to have confidence that the new platform would be able to handle like the high levels of traffic that we see on GOV.UK Pay. Also we wanted to look at how we would actually deploy these apps. Having more confidence in our deployments, moving to continuous deployment where possible. So while those things weren't like directly impacted by Fargate, doing this migration like gave us the opportunity to explore some of those other improvements that we could make. And yeah, I think we've really benefited.   Vanessa Schneider:  That makes sense, it's always nice to not just keep things ticking over, but making big improvements, that feels really rewarding, I think. Can you give us an impression of what the situation was before the migration maybe?   Kat Stevens:  On our previous infrastructure, we were running ECS tasks on EC2 launch types - so those are sort of, relatively long-lived instances that we had to provision, patch, maintain. And the developers on the, on the rest of the team, and I--we're not necessarily infrastructure specialists, but when developers on our support rota would end up spending sort of like maybe 5, 6, 7 hours a week just maintaining our EC2 instances, we kind of realised that something had to change [laughs]. And use it, moving to a serverless infrastructure, it's just completely removes that burden of having to provision and make, roll our AMIs, our machine images. We, that just doesn't happen anymore. And we've freed up our developers to work on features. And yeah, the, the infrastructure burden on Pay is just so much less.   Vanessa Schneider:  Oh, that sounds really helpful. I’m not sure if migrations are an every-day kind of job for site reliability engineers or software developers, so I was wondering if there’s anything that stood out about this process, like an opportunity to use new tools, or a different way of working?   Jonathan Harden:  So yeah, it's fun to work with new tools. But there, there, you get to--part of working here, and something I've seen in the time I've been here already, is that we don't rush into those decisions. So it's perfectly possible to see the, the new hot thing in the industry and rush straight for that without a good understanding of what are the trade-offs here. Everything has some trade-offs. And here at GDS, what I've found personally is that we put a lot of effort into understanding what, what's involved in the change; what will the experience be like for - I mean, the customer experience, the user experience, people actually paying for services, that needs to remain rock solid the whole time - but what's the, what's the experience like for developers? So developers have a cycle. They, you know, they write code, they want to test that code somewhere, they want to get it approved and push it to production. And, and so right now, we're undergoing a process of replacing some of our deployment pipelines. And as part of that, we're, we're in the early stages of this, but we're doing real research into how will our change of that be for the developers. And there's something really, really, really rewarding about looking at the different options available, seeing what is the new, the newest cool things, are they where to go? Do you want to go to something a bit, a bit older and a bit more stable? Is there a happy medium? What will the experience for developers be like there? What will the maintenance burden be like?   And one of the things for me here is that I'm seeing that e-even down in the teams, it's, these decisions aren't being taken by somebody higher up saying: 'we're going to move to this thing, make it happen'. And instead we've, we're doing research down in the teams that are going to do the work, speaking to the developer-- we're going to be speaking to the developers and surveying all the developers about what do you want from not just the change to stay the same, but change to make an improvement. And it's really, it's exciting to work with the new tools and the new possibilities, and it's also exciting to be involved in making those decisions.   It marks quite, it was quite stark for me when I first started and I was told this, this major project is going on and it's likely to be 3 to 6 months before we start work, start work on doing it because we're doing the research up front and it's happening in the teams. People are spiking on cool things. Which means even if it's technology that you don't get to use eventually, or that you choose - not don't get to, but choose not to use eventually, you know, the teams are helping to make this choice. You get to try out a bunch of different technologies. And one of the great things with that at GDS is: there are different parts of GDS, and different parts of GDS are using the tooling that is suitable for their area, that makes their area best, work best. And that does mean that there's scope for if you decide I want to work on this other cool thing and this other team are working on it, you can move into one of the other teams and work on that new cool technology.   Kat Stevens:  I mean, I-I-I agree totally. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to move to Pay was to get more experience working on the infrastructure side of things. On a previous teams it was more sort of stuff like cool software engineering. And on Pay, I've learnt more Terraform than I [laughs] ever thought was possible to know. And loads of other skills like: I've got so familiar with like all the, the intricacies of it as well. And kind of like sort of pushing it to its limits almost, and trying to get the best out of the tools for our, for our team and for our projects. And yeah, it's, it's, it's been really exciting. I mean, one of the new shiny tools that we've been looking at was cloud watch, and we use it for running our smoke tests now. And that was part of the, we kind of like rolled that into the, the Fargate migration project because it seems like a good way of us, like checking that our deployments were working correctly. It took a little bit of wrangling for it to get, fit that into our deployment pipeline. But, but it is really cool sort of like seeing the new thing just falling into place. And now it looks like some of the other teams are following us and using that, that tool as well. So it feels, it feels [laughs] quite nice to be a trailblazer.   Vanessa Schneider:  No pressure to get it right then [laughs]. What were some of the things on your mind when you were making those selections then?   Kat Stevens:  We wanted to make sure that we'd made the right decision. So we did spend a fair amount of time actually analysing all the options. In the end, we, we went with Fargate, purely because it meant that we could reuse some of our existing infrastructure.   Overall we kind of prioritised what was going to be the lowest risk in terms of how we were going to do the migration. Like would any sort of mi--you know, would we need any downtime; would this impact like our, our paying users; would it impact on like our service teams, the actual sort of government departments who use Pay; would it im-impact other developers who were actually trying to build new features. And if they've got a platform that's shifting underneath them, that's always going to be difficult. So we were really trying to go for an option that met our needs and like achieved our goals of reducing maintenance burden, saving costs as well, obviously. And yeah, [laughs] just making it, making like Pay an easy, you know, simpler and easier to be a developer on. And weighing that up with, you know, what, what's this like you know, new and shiny thing, like what's all this. Like you know, because there's so many tools out there. But if it's going to take us like a huge amount of effort to actually migrate to them, then I--is that benefit actually going to pay for itself or not? So we, we actually did quite a lot of the investigation analysis, a big spreadsheet [laughs] trying to calculate how much like developer time like in hours per week of what's being spent on infrastructure maintenance and kind of trying to estimate what-- how that would change when we moved.   Vanessa Schneider:  Cool, that sounds like the bigger picture view the co-Tech Lead would have of course. Jonathan, any, any benefits that stood out to you perhaps?   Jonathan Harden:  The, the process of trying these things is really interesting. One of the things that we do at GDS that is not something I've ever experienced elsewhere, I know it does happen elsewhere in the industry, but is, we have what I call firebreaks. So they're a gap between quarters. Now when I say quarters, we're not like planning so these 12 things will happen in the quarter. We are, like our team is running a full Kanban approach because we're an infrastructure team that do some support. And one of the things with those firebreaks is they're a week long. So I've worked lots of places where you do hack days and hack days are great but one day isn't really very much time to truly try something deeply. On the firebreak, you get the opportunity to work, to try something that might-- you know something's coming up. You know you're going to do this migration. You've got some thoughts about, 'ooh, there's this technology. I've heard it's great. I can give it a real try and I can prove to other people that this is something we should seriously consider, especially if it's really exciting for you'. Or you might use the opportunity as well to, to scratch an itch that's been bugging you.   So like I-I- just to give you an example of what: we've just had a firebreak. And during that firebreak, we saw several different versions of Terraform. For people that know Terraform, some of them were the versions that use the older version of the language - so HTL1 - and some of them with the version that used HTL2, and it means they're not very compatible. So I used that firebreak as an opportunity to upgrade all of our Terraform to get everything up to the very latest. And like that's really scratched an itch for me. And that's not necessarily super exciting for everybody, but for people that have to work on this day to day, it is very, very, very [laughs] exciting. And, but other people did spikes on trying out a whole deploy-- new type of deployment, which is part of what we're doing going forward. And I'm seeing across the other teams, the developer teams, people trying spikes from potential product features, it's very exciting to see those things happening in other teams and people really trying out, and not just a quick hack, but like really trying: 'can we get somewhere with this, and what's the opportunity for using this in the future?' And it's what people wanted to work on. And that's really, really, that was really exciting for me as, as a part of the research, like the ongoing research, the fact that they happen every quarter. It's very exciting.   Vanessa Schneider:  Kat, firebreaks - what’s your opinion, are you a fan?   Kat Stevens: Obviously at GDS like our quarters like, you know, we do carry over work between quarters, but it is nice to have that, that week or so where you can just like think about something else. You can, it's, you can recharge, you can reset little bit, you can try something new. And having like the, like the support from senior management to do that as well and have that space to experiment and try out new things to fail as well, I think that's so important. And even if your product like, never makes it outside a firebreak, you can, it will stick in your memory. And so when 6 months later they say, 'oh, maybe we should try this' and you can actually say: 'that might be a disaster. I remember it from my firebreak' [laughs]. Or you've got that background knowledge to just give context on a wider discussion, perhaps. I think it's so useful.    And also it kind of gives you an opportunity to potentially collaborate with people who y-you don't normally work with or with people in different roles as well. So rather than just us working within the migration team or the feature teams, we can kind of chop and change. You can work with like User Researchers or Content Designers and do just the things you wouldn't normally do. And or even if you just need a little bit of time to do some housekeeping or tidy ups and stuff that's, like Jonathan said, is just scratching that itch. So I love, I love a firebreak.   Vanessa Schneider:  It sounds like the firebreaks have been really productive then - are there any other wins you can share from the migration as well perhaps?   Jonathan Harden:  One of the interesting things, for me one of the interesting things about working in Pay specifically in GDS, is that we have to maintain PCI compliance because we're taking payments. Now that's not something I'd ever done before coming into Pay. So the, the first thing I did in Pay was learn about PCI and spend some time learning about what it, what it means to be compliant. But part of that is called protective monitoring. So you have active scanning going on looking for 'is anything nefarious happening over here, has anything goes wrong over there'. And that means that you, people have to spend time responding to those reports. And those reports, you occasionally get a false positive. But spending all that time dealing with those reports and investigating them like that's, that's all been freed up now.   But that means we can focus on future improvements more. So we've, our, we have a new environment to test performance of the application in. W e're going through a process at the moment of making it so that that environment can appear when it needs to appear and go away when it doesn't need to be there. And that, of course means saving money, which you know, we work in the Civil Service, this is taxpayer money. This isn't like venture capital, it's the money that all of us pay in tax. And so it's like even more important to make sure that we're spending the right money. It's not to not spend money, it's to spend the right money and only the money that you need to spend. And so we're able to spend time making sure that we can have that environment scale itself down and scale itself back up and use that learning of scaling up and down those environments to start working on potentially auto-scaling the other environments so that they respond to meet demand instead of needing to be at the capacity for peak demand all the time.   This is, the-these are quite exciting things in themselves, but like we wouldn't have, we wouldn't necessarily have the time to do these smaller improvements that, you know, that will save money. They'll make a big difference in how much we spend.   Vanessa Schneider: What about you Kat, any thoughts?   Kat Stevens:  Yeah, so previously while the majority of our apps were running as tasks on EC2 instances, we did have a couple of Fargate apps running. And people were a bit nervous about updating them and deploying them. But now we are deploying to Fargate everywhere, suddenly, it doesn't seem so much of a big deal anymore. And so we've been able to kind of demystify some of those extra auxiliary apps. We've had really good feedback from the developer team saying like: 'this is great. We don't even have to, you know have like a, mental energy spent on worrying about this app anymore'. And that's kind of like the same for our other sort of, the, the bits and pieces that go under the radar. So this is something we're kind of looking at now is: how do we make sure our NginX proxies are patched and up to date and get deployed quickly, and it's not going to be a, a huge mental effort even [laughs] to kind of even think about how do we do this: 'we don't do this very often. Am I going to have to look this up again?' We can automate more of these processes and just have a more stable and reliable platform.   Vanessa Schneider:  It can be intimidating when you don’t do a process frequently, just wanting to make sure you get everything exactly right, I think a lot of people can relate to that, but it’s so good [laughs] everyone’s confident now!   Kat Stevens:  Big factor but yes.   Vanessa Schneider:  So, obviously, Kat, you aren't a Site Reliability Engineer, but working on this project has given you the opportunity to upskill in the area. Is that right? Is that a common practise? Is it, is it normal for Software Developers to sort of take on a project like this to learn these things?    Kat Stevens:  It's interesting. I think the role of a Software Developer at GDS, it can be so broad. And there's so many different types of things you can work on. I was working on Python projects for a couple of years. And I've sort of like, dipping my toes into a bit of Ruby and bit of JavaScript. And...but, but the previous team I was working on, the infrastructure was very stable and there, there wasn't really any, a huge need to like revamp it or do any major bits of work on it. So while there was a couple of bits and pieces ad-hoc here and there, it kind of felt like the, the infrastructure side of the whole software engineering ecosystem, [laughs] for want of a better word, the, the, the infrastructure side of it was, was a gap in my knowledge. And so it's been really good to be able to move to Pay and like roll up my sleeves and get stuck in and you know like, figure out all these IAM permissions, what, what needs to be done where and actually sort of like get, getting that experience in like lifting the hood and seeing what's powering the, the actual software underneath. And almost like going down through the layers and yeah, [laughs] it's been, it's been really eye-opening actually. Like...previously, I would have never described myself as doing any sort of DevOps side of things, and I was actually quite like scared of Bash scripts. And now they are, yeah, well, I wouldn't say second nature, but they're not so scary anymore [laughs].   Vanessa Schneider:  That's a great outcome in my books. Jonathan, is it common practise to have somebody come in like that for you? I mean, obviously you've not been at GDS for a long time, but I was just wondering how this compares to the private sector.   Jonathan Harden:  So lots of people want to be a Site Reliability Engineer, it's a very kind of hot field. It's a very cool area to work in. And I don't just mean across the industry. I mean, I think that's a, I really, really like this role. I've put on many hats over my career and this is the one I'm enjoying the most by a long way. But, so in a previous company, I was like leading a team of infras-- there we were calling ourselves Infrastructure Engineers, but we were hiring Site Reliability Engineers. And actually, we found that it, it was, in some ways it was better to have a more diverse team in previous role as well. I mean, like, I always believe it's better to have a diverse team anyway in all aspects. But having people from a software engineering background and people from a systems administration background, like a traditional SysAdmin background, bringing those people together, especially if you've got one or two experienced Site Reliability Engineers already, works really, really well. People want to upskill into this area. Upskill isn't even necessarily the right word. People want to move into this area. It's not that it's an upskill, it's, it's, it's sideways. It's a different kind of role. And it means that they're very enthusiastic and they really want to learn these things and they want to demystify the scary things like Kat was talking about. So me personally, I've been, she mentioned Bash, I've been using Bash for many, many, many years [laughs] since about 2001, I think something like that. So that's not scary for me, but for people who haven't worked with it, I can help them with, like you know, I can help people and I can mentor them and I can show them good practises are.   Vanessa Schneider:  I don't think I've heard a better recommendation for folks to become site reliability engineers - keep an eye out on our vacancies as there are continuously opportunities at GDS to work on exciting projects like this migration, or broaden your skill sets. But just to recap, would you say there’s anything you’re particularly proud of as a result of this migration?   Kat Stevens:  The--like the actual how we did the rollout itself like with zero downtime. I thought that was pretty cool. But also maybe kind of like in the ways that we actually worked as a team around it as well because it was quite a long running project. And I think there's some interesting parts about how we like re-reassured ourselves that we were doing the right thing. Like, you know, regular retrospectives, firebreaks like we've mentioned, like how we dealt with unexpected work coming along because [laughs] as well as being like the migration team, we are also kind of the infrastructure team. So any kind of unexpected bits and pieces that came up, it would be our team that, we would have to like temporarily pause the migration work and pick up you know, whatever it was. So how we responded to that and you know how we communicated with each other, I-I think that's kind of a whole, a whole other podcast in itself almost.   Vanessa Schneider:  It sounds like there is an amazing community that you can tap into to keep up to date, make sure that work isn't being duplicated. And clearly there’s a lot to be proud of regarding the product performance.    Jonathan Harden:  Yeah, so something that I found a little different here from other places I've worked, even larger organisations, that actually really helps with the sharing of information: so we, we have various like show and tell type catch-up meetings but for a wider than just your small area of the, of the business. So we have a catch up every week amongst all the infrastructure people. And there we all talk about what are we working on right now; like what things are we looking at in the future; are there challenges that you faced; how is the business as usual stuff going in your area. And conversations often come out of that into: 'oh, you're trying out this new technology?' Or you might, because we have it every week, you might mention like: 'oh we're starting to look at this thing' and you'll hear other people's opinions on either the thing you're trying or what you're aiming at or what they've done.   So we, I was mentioning we're doing this tuning our deployment pipelines, so we have a-a few peo-teams are all doing that as well. And so we have a channel where we're talking about that. And as people are trying things, they're putting in that channel like what they're trying, how it's going, like what the challenges they faced are and, you know, asking for help as well: have other people tried this; what, did you manage to solve this issue or that issue. And I really feel like the collaboration across parts of GDS and the wider Cabinet Office is, is really, really good. within the infrastructure side, it's really good. There's definitely like beyond the infrastructure I do attend, we do have show and tells where people get to show like the thing they're working on that's not just infrastructure related, and that's been, that's really good as well for just understanding like the wider landscape of what's happening across Cabinet Office. And that's that's really, they're really helpful to communicate those things and to work out: 'are we working on the same thing'; 'are you about to start working on the thing that I'm working on'; 'have you already done this and can you give me some pointers'. And that's really good.   Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah, it’s nice that you've had the opportunity to share your learnings with the community. Do you have any, maybe, more personal reflections on this work perhaps?   Jonathan Harden:  Yeah. So working at the Cabinet Office, it's the first time I've worked for the Civil Service and I'm very aware it's, it's different than the other roles that I've had because I'm like, I feel like I'm kind of helping wider society. We all have to pay the government for all sorts of things. And Pay supports many different services, including - on a previous version of the GDS podcast, you talk to some of the product people from Pay, and I listened to that before I joined Pay, before I joined GDS, and it was really interesting to hear the esoteric services that we have - but of course we have some, we have some bigger services as well and other government departments coming online all the time. And knowing that the infrastructure we're working on supports the ability for the public to pay things that they need to pay to the government or they want to pay, you know, they, like you said, they might be buying a fishing licence or something like that. And that's, knowing that we make it easier for people to do that and that it's done in a way that focuses on the accessibility of the service so any member of the public can try and pay through us and will have, not reach barriers like their screen reader software can't work with the service.    These are, knowing that I'm giving this back as part of my role, it makes a big difference to me as an Engineer. It's, it's, it's kind of the first, one of the first times where I've not have some kind of crisis around like, 'oh, am I giving back to society, wider society?'. And now I really feel like I am. And that's a real big part of what's making me so happy here among working on a fantastic team and a great org, and on cool technology, of course.   Vanessa Schneider:  That's so lovely to hear, Jonathan, [laughs] thank you for sharing. If you are similarly minded and want to try and help wider society, do keep an eye on our careers page. That's: GDS careers dot gov dot uk [gdscareer.gov.uk] for openings. It could be in site reliability engineering, it could be general software developer, it could be very different, but we're always looking for new folks to join us and bring their perspective into the organisation.    Thank you to Jonathan and Kat for joining me on the episode. If you like it, you can listen to all other episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast, like Jonathan has, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast platforms, and the transcripts are also available on PodBean.    Goodbye.   Jonathan Harden:  Toodelo.   Kat Stevens:  Goodbye!

Faced with a tight deadline, the team finally manage to deliver an episode of about the desired length! This week, Gwen, Neil and Sanj are looking at the explosion of new digital players in the 'Buy Now Pay Later' market, looking at the ethics of building features which can generate profit from the vulnerable, and asking whether employers are doing enough to encourage discussions about prudent financial behaviour. There's also discussion about loot boxes and other forms of gambling, during which Gwen gets mad at a fake casino. There's still enough time for all three hosts to pick scarily similar stories in News Bytes - if you're interested in overpaying for novelty tech, this week is the episode for you (apart from Sanj's story, which could get you arrested if you're a careless Australian). TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Start   00:56 The Stand-Up   06:10 Social Engineering   09:54 This Week's Epic   25:13 News Bytes   34:12 The Wash Up LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK: YouTube: #LeadDev - Marco Rogers - Creating a career ladder for engineers YouTube: Postman - The Busy Developer's Guide to Testing (21st October livestream) CNBC: British fintechs are jumping into the booming buy now, pay later market Mastercard: Mastercard reinvents installments to give consumers more payment choices wherever they shop Money Saving Expert: First-ever financial education textbook lands in schools Polygon: EA calls its loot boxes "surprise mechanics", says they’re used ethically  Citizens Advice Bureau StepChange debt charity The Guardian: An0m - the inside story of the most daring surveillance sting in history Stack Overflow: No joke - you can buy our copy/paste keyboard right now Digital Undivided: supporting Black and Latinx women entrepreneurs The Independent: Amazon's new Astro robot is a "privacy nightmare" Twitter: @DimaKrotov - the stranded Roomba

We discuss lessons learned when it comes to digital identity, the importance of cross-government collaboration, and how other service teams can get involved. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS.   Today, we will expand on our plans to remove unnecessary complexity by developing one inclusive and accessible way for people to log in to all government services online. An easy way to prove their identity just once, that also gives them control over who has access to their data and why.   I'm joined by Will Myddelton, Product Manager, and Helena Trippe, Senior Service Designer, both in the Digital Identity programme here at GDS, as well as Tom Stewart, Assistant Head of Modernisation at Veterans UK, that have been working with GDS to test their technology and processes. So let's start with you Will, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners?   Will Myddelton: Of course, Vanessa. Hi everyone. I'm Will, I'm a Product Manager on our Identity workstream. And what that means is on Digital Identity, we've split the work into 3 streams. We have one for authentication, we have one for identity, and we have one for managing data. And my work is to lead the work on our 3 teams that are thinking about the identity part of that puzzle. And as a Product Manager, really, my role is to set the direction that we're going in. And the way that we really do that is by building a shared understanding between all of the different teams so that we all understand the problem that we're working on, with the goal that we can work as the wonderful autonomous human individuals that we are.    Vanessa Schneider: Fantastic, thank you Will. Helena, how about you, would you please introduce yourself?   Helena Trippe:  So my name is Helena. I'm a Service Designer in Will's team and in the Digital Identity stream. I have been in the programme since, for-for a year now. And it's really, really fantastic to see the excitement growing both within the programme and also across service teams for the work that we're doing. And it's growing in momentum all the time.   And my role within the team has really been to act as a little bit of a glue. We're a multidisciplinary team: we have User Researchers, we have Interaction Designers, we've got Business Analysts and trying to make sure that we are feeding in a lot of the learning back into the product development as we iterate and learn from service teams.   Vanessa Schneider: Great. Thank you, Helena. Finally, Tom, would you like to introduce yourself as well, please?   Tom Stewart: I'm Tom Stewart. I work for Veterans UK, a pillar of Defence Business Services, part of the Ministry of Defence. I'm the service owner for a service called the Armed Forces Compensation and War Pension Scheme. Essentially the, the service is: if you are, if you are a service person or you were a service person and you have an injury or a condition that you believe is attributable to your time in the service, then you may be entitled to some form of compensation. And we're, we're digitising what was previously a bit of a paper heavy service. I run, I-I lead a little multidisciplinary team. And my role was the, the kind of overall responsibility for the development and the, the operation and the, the continuous improvement of the scheme.   Vanessa Schneider: Fantastic. Thank you, Tom, for introducing yourself as well. So there are people who might not be following GDS's work within the digital identity space, it's hard to believe, Will and Helena, but can you tell me about what your team has been working on?   Will Myddelton: Anyone that's been working in government over the last 10 years knows that GDS has worked on a product called Verify for a long time, and Verify came from a really good place. It is a real common need of service teams to be able to check the identity of their users. We knew that right after we made GOV.UK right back at the start of GDS and Verify was started to address that need.   The pandemic was a, a really big event for digital identity in the UK. Verify usage shot up. But at the same time it magnified all the problems that there were. And so in last year's spending review, the government committed money back to GDS, which given some of the reputation we've got for doing digital identity in the past, but we're really honoured to, to be trusted to do this, to tackle digital identity from the centre of government once again.   And so what we've been doing since really 1 April - like that's when our, our funding settlement came in and we've got a year of funding - is we've really been trying to work out what the right approach to tackle digital identity this second time around is.   And we've had to be really open with ourselves and with the people that we speak to. And believe me, people around government are open with us about what we've got wrong with Verify. But we've also had to be open to the fact that there were some things that we got right in Verify that we're going to continue. So since 1 April, we've done a discovery period on identity and we did twin discoveries, one into the needs of end users and one into the needs of service teams.   And then from June until where we are now, we've been in an Alpha. And so what we're doing in our Alpha is experimenting with different ways that we can do digital identity better at GDS for the whole of government; and particularly how we can, this time round, design a digital identity product based on the needs of service teams.   Because my observation from having worked on Verify in 2015 and then having worked on, like, the next generation of platform products that we made in GDS - like I was involved in the Notify Alpha and Beta and I worked on Pay and I worked on all those Government as a Platform Products - is that by the time we started those, we'd changed our stance on how we thought about developing products for the whole of government.   By the time we came to 2015 and did all those Government as a Platform products, we had to instead develop things that were so good that services wanted to use them. And we developed a number of ways of thinking about product development for platforms that are going to be used by service teams across government in that 3 years, 2015 to 2018.   And so really why I'm here and what we're trying to do in our Alpha is, we're trying to apply those techniques to a very, very complicated and slightly overwhelmingly complex space of digital identity. We're trying to design a product that solves digital identity for the UK users of government services in a way that service teams will adopt because they love it.   Helena Trippe: And if I can add a little bit of the how, I guess, in terms of how we've been delivering that: we started very early on, even in Discovery stage as, as we've moved into the Alpha, kind of honed that a little bit more, to work very collaboratively with service teams, engaging them early on and trying to really put things in front of them so we get their feedback quite quickly and working iteratively to, to make sure that we can test their expectations. We can understand kind of how they understand identity, what are their mental models around it, that we can also start testing how we are communicating these things to really get feedback really quickly and iteratively and kind of engage them throughout the process. So that's, that's kind of something that we started through the discovery and are continuing to do that through the Alpha. And I believe we'll continue to do and, and grow as we, as we move on.   Will Myddelton:  We're, we are trying to make it easier to access government services where every user has a single set of credentials, typically username and password, that they can use to access any government service in the future so that users don't have to remember lots of different passwords, but also so that like new and exciting things can happen with the future of digital services, where we can start to think about sharing data more easily between services.   And so a key part of that: digital identity is no longer a standalone thing for us. Digital Identity is really a feature of your login to government or your GOV.UK account.   So at the point at which a service like Universal Credit knows that, it needs to know that you are who you say you are to pay you our money, the idea is that you will be logged in with your account, you will do an identity check that will allow Universal Credit to pay out money to you. But then that identity check result will be saved so that every other service that you use after Universal Credit doesn't have to go through the same process. So there's a huge user benefit there, which means you don't have to do this very difficult process again and again.   And there's actually a huge government benefit there, which is that we can start to design services that expect you to be who you say they are, which, which opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.   Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you so much for sharing with us, yeah, what, what you are working on. I was wondering, why is this work important for government service teams?   Will Myddelton: That's a really good question. So...like with all the platforms that GDS makes for government service teams, we've got 2 sets of users and the really obvious one is the end users. And it's really important that we get the identity journeys right for them. But the less obvious one and the one that it's always taken us a while to work out how to design for are service teams around government. So we've done maybe 50 different interviews and research sessions so far with service teams about identity over the last 6 weeks.   And I think there's, there's kind of a few big reasons: one is that it makes identity checks easier for their users. Checking people's identity documents is often quite an onerous process in government. You might have to go down to the Post Office and hand stuff over. You might have to go to have an interview with a passport examiner. You might have to send your passport away - like there's lots of examples where passports are sitting in envelopes in government like processing centres, and that means the user doesn't have that passport for a long time. So services care a lot about their users. And so making things easier for the users when it comes to these difficult things like proving your identity, that's a really big benefit to the service teams.   A second thing that has come out of the research is that, services care a lot about including all their users. So one of the things when we talk about identity that service teams are very worried about is that, yeah, there can be a digital journey that might work for people that have like high strength identity documents, like passports and driving licences and are able to do things digitally online - and that's fine for those users.   But services are very worried about people that don't fit into that group, and that's a lot of people. And so they're worried about that for a couple of reasons. One: because the people that run services are generally really good people and they care. Like they just care, and they want to include everyone that should be able to use their service. And if we're running an identity check and that's the thing that excludes them, then that's a real problem.   But the other reason that service teams care a lot about this is: cost. And it costs service teams an awful lot to, any time someone can't do something in a kind of automated routine way, and that service team has to do manual processing or they have to procure a contract with a supplier so that the people can go and do things with them. So there is actually like a quite a hardcore cost saving element as well, which is that the less inclusive our platform is or identity checks are, the greater the burden of cost, time and effort the service teams have to bear.   Really, what guides all our work at GDS about platforms for service teams is that: we think that service teams should be able to spend their budgets and their time and their human creativity solving the problems that are unique to their service and identity is not really a unique problem. So really behind all of our work is this goal to save service teams time and money by not focussing on problems that everyone has, and instead to be able to focus on their unique users and the service that they're doing.   Helena Trippe:  I think in terms of the findings that we've been seeing through the research, is that service teams really want to be able to do the right thing. So as part of the, the product page concept testing, we started to see that as they kind of engage with information, particularly around like choosing the right level of strength or understanding what documents can be used, they're constantly kind of making those calculations in their head around kind of what's the right trade off, for the sets of users that I'm, I-I need to kind of make sure that I get through my service.   But also, I think another aspect, that for me was really interesting was that we, we also need to kind of be, be aware that we're trying to kind of give them the tools and the information also to make a case internally; to be able to help them convince, I guess, external and internal stakeholders and decision makers about why this is a good thing to, to, to use in the dot. And that, that was really, really, really mind-blowing, at least for me [laughs], in terms of making sure that we can get them to see themselves in, in, in the tools and the information that we're providing.   Vanessa Schneider: That’s great to know. Obviously we have a service owner present which is priceless, so if you don’t mind me asking, Tom, what are your thoughts on this?   Tom Stewart: Yeah, I thought perhaps I could add a bit of colour to some of the things that Will and Helena are saying. So when you consider our users, you know, a great deal of our users are, are veterans right? And I say the word veteran, and, and I'm going to guess that many people listening today, your, your mind immediately went to a 90-year old Chelsea pensioner with a red coat.   But of course a, a veteran can be 17 years old, a veteran can be someone who's had one day’s service, accidentally shot themselves in the foot and, and are, are out of the service. And that person is still, is still you know very much a veteran. But that person is a, you know, a lot more digitally literate than the, probably than t-t-the Chelsea pensioner.   I suppose what I'm saying is the, going back to Will's point, i-it was about inclusivity. You know, that's very much at the front of our minds as we, as we develop this service. Cost, yes, i-it, but, of course it factors in. Making it easier for our teams, yes, absolutely vital.   But the, the, the last thing that I don't think I've heard mentioned yet is also, it's about, it's about plugging into the kind of strategic landscape. So my, my ability to, to verify users, has, has a much wider applicability for our business. So, yes, it's great I can use it for Armed Forces Compensation, War Pension - fantastic. But there's so much more that I can do with that. And actually, once we have done all of the work with the integration et cetera, we can quickly pivot at that point to right, ok, we've cracked this. We're answering a whole question. Now what can we do for these people over here?    Helena Trippe:  What we started to see as well is particularly from speaking to local authorities - so we have been speaking to a few local authorities as part of the, the, the research process, that almost identity is an enabler for them to do all sorts of things, including getting staff onto the systems to be able to allocate work or do casework or, or process council tax information.    Vanessa Schneider: That is brilliant to hear. So I know that within 4 months, you've talked to more than, I don't know, it's been hundreds and hundreds of end users, multiple dozens of service teams. I'm really keen to find out what it is that you've learnt so far?   Will Myddelton:  Yeah, I mean, there are new learnings too. So talking about the approach we've taken, I think it's important to talk about that, that we take 2 different approaches when we're thinking about designing the service team.   So, so the one that we talk about mostly here is, is a very bottom-up approach. It's recognising that services are delivered by small groups of motivated people working in a really distributed government, where actually sometimes the lines of communication and control from the top of the department are not always clear. So sometimes sitting at the centre of government, it looks like you can make a change around government by speaking to the departments and that that will filter down. But our experience with Government as a Platform is that's, that's absolutely the opposite of what's going on here.    So we have a 2-pronged approach to how we think about designing with service teams. One is that we, we, we want to speak to people who are working in service teams, any people - Product Managers, Technical Architects, caseworkers, policy people - because these are teams of people and they, they vary considerably around government, so we want to speak to people who are thinking about identity.   And the reason we want to speak to them is: we need to be able to do a user-centred design process with those people that might include, like interviewing them about their context and their needs or showing them prototypes of what we're doing and seeing how they land with them and how we're talking about it or like actually watching them integrate with our system. So when we're, got some documentation, sitting them in with Developers and watching them go through our onboarding steps. And all of that is in service of: we're trying to shape the product to meet their needs and then we're trying to communicate about the product in a way that makes it clear that we meet their needs and then we're trying to make the product easy to use so that there are no barriers to them using it.   Unfortunately, in government, like there is no like recruitment agency that goes out and finds us service teams and there is no list of service teams in government. So what we really have to do, and we learnt this on Notify and Pay and Government as a Platform, is we have to generate hype about what we're doing and then have people come to us. And that's a really good test for us, because what it says to us is: if what you're doing is not exciting, you're not going to generate demand, which doesn't give you people for research, which means you can't generate a product that meets user needs. So it's a really high bar for us to go through. But that's the bar that, that makes this stuff work for us; is we have to generate excitement and then turn that excitement into research sessions with people that haven't seen our product before and then use that to develop a product that really excites people. It's like a little virtuous circle.   So we spent a bunch of time setting up that process and part of why we're on this podcast and talking about it so that anyone that hears this that works on a service team or knows people that work on a service team is thinking about identity, we would love you to get in touch and take part in our research. It's fun. Like we are really, you know respectful people, we're here to understand your stories. And you will get to play with the early versions of our prototypes and our product and you will get to influence direction. So that's the bottom-up approach.   But we also are not naive. We understand that there is a top-down approach as well. So we are out engaging with all of the major departments that provide identity solutions. In the last couple of weeks, I've been in really quite amazing sessions with HMRC [Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs], DWP [Department for Work & Pensions], Home Office - these people that have been grappling with identity for years, and they're very graciously sharing their learnings and their challenges and things that they should tell us to watch out for.   But Vanessa, what you really asked is what we've learnt, so one of the things that we've learnt is that we, we do have to be able to talk about how we're different to Verify, because people that think about digital identity know about Verify. And unless we mention it, it's the elephant in the room. So, so there are 4 ways that we're different to Verify.    The first is that we're really focussed on the idea that this is for everyone this time. We didn't do inclusion well enough on Verify. We've got a team of people, we've got objectives, long-term objectives and goals in our programme, set around making sure that we don't exclude people. So that's one really big way.   A second way that we're different is that we don't have what are called third-party identity providers. So the way that Verify worked is you would have to pick a private sector company to verify your identity. And what it really did was it separated us from all the performance data that we should have been using to improve the system, because all of that was hidden away from us in these third-party companies by design. But it meant it was really hard for us to make incremental improvements to our product.    The third way that we're really different is that we're not taking a one-size-fits-all approach. Verify had a very much all-or-nothing approach. You set the level of identity that you wanted and people either passed or they failed. And if they failed, firstly, the service didn't get any information about why they failed or what they'd passed on. And secondly, the user had to enter all that information again next time around. None of it was saved.   So we're experimenting with lots of different ways this time that we can take a much more nuanced approach to help pass across information about the 'was successful' to the service teams so they can pick that up and do their own checks on the service if they need to. And on the user side, anything they've already entered and already passed is saved for any future identity check.   And then the final way, which you'll hear me go on about and you are hearing me go on about till I'm blue in the face, is that we are designing with the needs of service teams from day one. So I know we said that it can't all be about what's different from Verify, but it is really important for us to talk to teams about what is different from Verify as a way to show that we have learnt.   Helena Trippe: In terms of the findings, but also I guess what's really exciting from a service design point of view is that we've also been kind of trying to understand, how - within the constraints that we, we need to operate within - so, you know, making sure that we deliver something that's easy to use, that's simple enough, so that it's not too complicated in either for us to build or for service teams to integrate with, having and exploring, I guess, where the identity check might be fitting in within a service journey.   So we started to see from the early discovery work, but also some of the prototype testing that we were doing on the product page, how people were kind of trying to understand as well, “well, how do I fit the identity processing, the identity journey within my, within my own kind of service journey?”.   But also kind of, again thinking through those trade-offs that they're making. So: “ok, so if I put it in the beginning of the journey, will that create too much of a barrier for my users? Or if I put it at the end of the journey, will that allow me then at least to collect all the eligibility information that the applicant has submitted and then take a view as to whether the applicant can actually go ahead with this particular identity journey or another identity journey that might be available?”. So that, that was really interesting to, to see and kind of see the appetite as well for, for that.    I was just going to add, I guess that, a thank you, actually, for your service teams. I think they've been incredibly generous with their time, incredibly generous with their knowledge. We've, we're learning. And it, and no, no matter how many times you go out to speak to people, you kind of always, I'm always amazed at how, how generous people are in terms of sharing their time, their knowledge and what they've, what they've learnt. So a big thank you.   Will Myddelton: Yeah, I-I-I totally agree with that, Helena. So I think that, from the 50 research sessions we've done with service teams about identity so far, I think there's 3 big questions that we know we need to answer really early on in that service team’s experience of our product.   So the first one is: “what on earth is an identity check and how does it fit in with my existing service?” And the reason that's so important to answer is because until we've, like, communicated the ways that our identity checks can fit in, you know, whether it's at the beginning or the end or at multiple points in a service, is really difficult to talk about, like the other benefits of them, right?    As soon as teams understand that, they move on to the second question, which is, “ok, fine. But how do I know this is going to work for all of my users?” And the research that we've done over the last 2 or 3 weeks has really led us to think that there's 3 ways that we need to talk about that.   One is we need to talk about how accessible our product and our identity checks will be. But to be honest, service teams just expect that we will do that and we expect that we will do that as well. So that's more of a reassurance than a, a big question.    The 2 things that we really need to talk about and be clear when it comes to inclusion are: what documents people can use - because services are very aware that not everyone has passports and driving licences, so we need to be very clear that our system allows people to use many more documents to prove their identity than simply driving licences and passports - and secondly, and I think the thing that has emerged really strongly from the research, is we need to talk much more convincingly about what it means to do identity checks in different channels.   And then the third question that we need to answer, which, let's be honest, is not a question of any service thing comes to us with, but as a result of the way that we're thinking about the product, is: “what are these 3 strengths of identity check or 4 strengths of identity check? And how do I pick the one that is right for my service?”   And I think this is the hardest thing that we face because it's quite a weird, abstract thing, these strengths of identity check. Because for each strength of identity check - we, we call them low, medium, high and extra high - you might choose a higher strength if you're doing something risky, like paying out money, and a lower strength if you're doing something less risky, like letting a user view some non-controversial data about themself.   But it's really hard to help services see themselves in that strength system because what you're doing in that strength system is you're trading off, like, risk of fraud and risk of security by going higher, but the higher you go, the fewer people are going to be able to complete that check because the harder it gets. And we're, we're really focussing on how we can explain that in a way that makes those trade-offs obvious to users.   And I think if I step back from those 3 questions, I think we've learnt something bigger in the last few weeks, which feels like a bit of an 'a-ha' moment for us, which is that the strength of the check plus the document that the user brings and the channel that the user does it in, combines to create a unique user journey for that context. And because it's combinatorial - there are 4 strengths, you might have 10 documents, each of which can be checked 2 or 3 ways across 4 channels - you're talking about hundreds of unique user journeys.   And so I think the thing that we've learnt over the last few weeks is that our core challenge is helping service teams understand what is going on with that weird, like, multiplicity of user journeys because they're going to be sitting in the service’s journey. So they need to know, before they even think about how to integrate, they need to understand the implications of those things.    And I'll say, I'll say one more thing that we’ve learnt: there is sometimes a tension between the things that our service team users need and that our job is to resolve that tension. So on the one hand, service teams need widely inclusive identity checks, and on the other hand, in research, service teams expect to be able to do things like specify which documents they will accept or which channels their users can use.   But actually, if you think about the user journey, is the result of strength plus document plus channel: the service only gets to choose the strength. Because the user gets to choose the document they have and the user gets to choose the channel. Services can't choose the documents and they can't choose the channels because that widens the inclusion of the product, which is a bigger need for service teams. And we've learnt that there is sometimes a tension between the, the different needs that service teams have. And we're going to have to do a better job of explaining why our product has decided to, to do things in a certain way.   Vanessa Schneider: Well, I was going to ask you, Tom, Will mentioned a bit earlier in his answer that hype is necessary in order to generate interest of service teams. Is this conversation the kind of hype that drew you in?   Tom Stewart: Absolutely. I-I-I love this conversation. I love the process of, of user research from beginning to end. I can absolutely attest to the, to the fun part that Will mentioned. We're having some great conversations with, with GDS and your teams just now. I-I'm particularly sensitive around content, around the language. So I, so I think I've been particularly challenging with some of your content design team about, the use of particular words and things like that. You know, all in, all in, for the best possible reasons, you know, to get the, to get the best result, best product.   We've, we've also had some particularly interesting conversations in Defence around that, again, the, the levels that, that we've been talking about. And a-again, I'm sitting here nodding away, whilst Will was talking. So, again, some really rich conversation.   To get back to your question, it was about the hype. And absolutely, yep, yep. We've, we've been caught up in that. We are encouraging it. We are, we're helping that, we're helping that, that that hype, we're helping to keep that going basically. I've been involved in this work for some, well really from its inception.   And I-I think it's absolutely a vital part of my role that I go back to Defence and I'm really, really quite loud about this work, you know. Anyone that will listen, anyone I think should listen or should know about this is hearing about this work because of the work that we're doing in Veterans UK. The, the, the hype is essential.   Vanessa Schneider: [laughs] Brilliant. Well we're always looking forward to new listeners. I was wondering, how is it that you found out that this work was happening? How did the first contact to the GDS team get established?   Tom Stewart: So, so I was one of those teams where Verify was a, an integral part of our, the technical solution. But we, you know, we engaged uh, with GDS and said, “right, how can we-- you know, presumably you've, you've got something in the pipeline. You know you're developing something new. How do we, how can we help you with that? You know, how can my, how can my user research assist you? You know, how can my Service Designer assist what, what you're doing over there? You know, can we, can we share our work?”   Vanessa Schneider: That makes a lot of sense, it's great to see that the relationship has been such a productive one from the beginning. Well, in that case, Will, Helena, I just want to know, are there more opportunities for service teams to get involved with you? How do they do that if it's the case?   Will Myddelton: I mean, yes, of course, there are. Like we're, we're, we're built on the goodwill of colleagues around government. Our products are only as good as the amount of, like, colleagues that volunteer their time to take part in research sessions.   The easiest way is to go to: sign hyphen in dot service dot GOV.UK [sign-in.service.gov.uk] and you'll see the GOV.UK sign product page and there's a big button on there called 'register your interest'. And whether you're interested in just login and authentication, which is what that page is mainly about, or whether you are interested in identity, if you register your interest on that page, one of our researchers will be in touch with you to do a preliminary interview to understand what your needs are, and then we triage that and you will be involved in one of our research sessions that is most appropriate to you and your service.   Please get involved. And some of the kind of research that we're likely to do over the next few months: some of it is like concept research - like there's going to be this product in the future, like how do you talk about how it would meet your needs or what wouldn't meet your needs? So that, that's really helping us design what the future state is, which then helps us design all the steps to get there.   And we also simultaneously doing research on the authentication products that we have launched first. So that's about like the first use of that as in your team. So if you want to integrate authentication and GOV.UK accounts into your service, you can, we're going to be doing research with people that look at the, the onboarding steps. Because what we've learned from doing these platform products in the past is that: it's not easy to onboard these platform products. And the way that we need to talk about it gets shaped by you know, round after round after round of that research.   So yeah, we really value that. And like Tom has said, we think they're actually quite fun experiences to be part of as well.   Vanessa Schneider: Right, brilliant. So you've heard it, folks, get in touch. We've clearly covered a lot of ground already, but I was wondering maybe, Helena, you could start us off with telling us what's next for you.   Helena Trippe: So, as Will suggested, we've kind of, as part of the, the, the research that we've been doing in the past 6 weeks, we've been very much focussing maybe a year, 18 months ahead, looking at the future of, the future state, of the identity product: trying to understand how teams and service teams engage with those concepts to also understand whether we are understanding it in the right way as a programme and have consistency, in terms of what we're talking about, particularly around kind of strength levels.   But I think for, for us now, there's a lot of focus on supporting as well the onboarding for the authentication journey, including looking at some of the support models in the service, management models around supporting users and service teams to link up with the authentication side of things and the sign on side of things. So that's quite exciting. I think we're very much trying to explore the extent as well of the self-service kind of model for support and what we can put in place to make sure that people feel supported, but also that it's not too much of a burden for us and service teams to, to be able to deliver that.   Vanessa Schneider: Great, Tom, how about you, where do you see this going next for you?   Tom Stewart: So we, we're squaring up for a Beta assessment towards the autumn this year. Which is very exciting. And there's a lot work going on just now to work out, to, to work out where precisely this work with GDS, where that lands. Like you know, should I, should I postpone the Beta perhaps for a more, for a more complete service or do I just turn up at the Beta with you know, very clear plans as to what my, what my plans are for the future and hope that I can still make a compelling, convincing case that we should be able to go live in the interim. So there's a lot of really rich conversation going on around that just now.   And otherwise, the plan is to-to very much pester you and GDS and make sure that we, that we stay as close to the front of the queue as possible, to continue working with you to continue to take your advice, but also hopefully to continue to have some of our advice received in kind. So, yeah, very exciting times for us in general.   Vanessa Schneider:  Well, consider yourself forewarned [laughs] Tom told you he'd pester you. Will, do you want to round us off with what you think's up next for you?   Will Myddelton: So we got a new Director, Natalie Jones, who's joining us in September. And that's really exciting. She comes with a huge amount of experience of delivering really innovative and you know, worthwhile, usable, workable digital identity products with the Home Office. So we're really excited about Natalie joining our programme.   Beyond that, identity work goes through its alpha self-assessment in September. So our identity teams are all hyper-focussed on that. A little bit nervous. Little bit excited. Getting people from around government to mark our work is a sign of a robust assessment process. And so we're, we're proud to take part in that. But it is also you know, tough, as anyone that's been through service assessment will attest.   And we are going live with the first service that will be using GOV.UK Signin for authentication, and that will be in October. So that's a really big deal for us. And Helena talks about we're focussing on supporting the delivery of that. So we're downing tools on some of our identity concept work for just a few weeks so that we can make sure that that launch goes smoothly because all of our identity work builds on top of the authentication work.   Vanessa Schneider: I have to say, I am really excited by the picture that you're painting, so I can't wait to see how it goes.    Thank you for joining me today on the podcast. It's been really great to hear how GDS is co-designing this work with other parts of government, hearing how it's being received by those parts of government, and just making sure that it's a truly collaborative product that works for all users, whether that's citizens or colleagues in the public sector. So just another reminder, in case we haven't said it often enough, if you are a service team in government and you're interested in becoming an early adopter, or if you work in a public sector service team more generally and want to share your experience for our research, you can visit the product page, that's: sign hyphen in dot service dot gov dot UK [sign-in.service.gov.uk] and you can register your interest. That was snappy. [laughs]   You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean.    Goodbye!   Will Myddelton: Goodbye.    Helena Trippe: Goodbye.    Tom Stewart:  Thanks everyone. Goodbye. 

This week, our main story is the debate over whether companies (and employees) should be happy to disclose salaries, in an attempt to drive pay equality, a chat made somewhat harder by Neil's repeated inability to pronounce the word "equality". We get deep into discussion about our experiences with knowing (or not knowing) how our colleagues are paid, companies and countries who we've seen get the balance right, and the challenges of introducing salary negotiations in the job-hunting process. But there's more! We'll also be talking about a secret new privacy-shattering setting in Chrome which is enabled by default, and bemoaning the lack of accessibility options in some modern games (and championing others which lead the way). You'll also hear what we've all been up to this week, including a top quality J-Lo story from Sanj, unexpectedly relevant election news from Neil, and Gwen basically doing everything under the sun. Plus there's an awful lot of Diablo II discussion for a podcast which isn't from the year 2000. TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Start   02:02 The Stand-Up   14:43 Social Engineering   21:46 This Week's Epic   44:00 News Bytes   52:22 Competition Time   53:09 The Wash-Up LINKS DISCUSSED THIS WEEK: Incident.io Ministry of Testing: Test.Bash() 2021 YouTube: Neil's Continuous Quality with Postman session Jamie Tanna: Providing a Public Salary History page GOV.UK: Equality Act 2010 Blind social network YouTube: Kevin Goldsmith: How does Salary Work? (LeadDev 2019) The Verge: Apple keeps shutting down employee-run survyes on pay equity - and labour lawyers say it's illegal The Register: Google emits Chrome 94 with 'Idle Detection' API to detect user inactivity amid opposition IGN: Deathloop's Lack of Accessibility Options Is Disappointing Players Tweet thread from Courtney Craven (Can I Play That) outlining Deathloop's issues

What is it about sitting down building a good study plan that... kinda sucks? Is it the planning? The execution? The Time commitment? Are we committing to learn too much? Regardless of this answer, today we’re sitting down to talk about how to better prepare to learn, how to execute a study plan to

We talk coding, solving common problems once and share some of the exciting challenges our developers, engineers and technical architects are working on. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Louise Harris: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Louise Harris and I head up the Creative and Channels Team at GDS. In this episode, we're talking about our wonderful technologists. The Site Reliability Engineers, Technical Architects and Developers who work in multidisciplinary teams to engineer solutions to our complex architectural needs, evolve our infrastructure and tooling to keep us resilient and online, and develop digital products and services used by millions of people across the UK, and that are emulated by governments around the world.    Technologists are a mainstay of how we help government transform and tackle complexity for users. Think about GOV.UK: it's actually 50 front and back end applications that are independently hosted and maintained that enable us to host over a million pages, deal with millions of visits a day and fend off regular Denial-of-Service attacks. But thanks to our technologists, all our end users see is a single site they can access day and night to get the information they need from government.    Tackling that kind of complexity is not always easy, but it's definitely worthwhile. And it's what GDS is here to do. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Himal Mandalia and Louise Ryan to talk about the important role GDS technologists play. Louise, Himal, why don't you introduce yourselves to our listeners and tell us a bit about your roles.   Louise Ryan:  Hello, I'm Louise Ryan, I'm the Lead Technical Architect and Head of Technology in Government as a Platform. I joined GDS just under 4 years ago and I joined us from the private sector where I worked in a digital agency as a Technical Architect.   Himal Mandalia:  And I'm Himal, I'm Head of Technology for GOV.UK, and I joined about 5 months ago, and I've been working in digital circles for about 6 years as a contractor in several roles, including Developer, Technical Architect and a Technology Advisor.   Louise Harris:  So, Louise, it sounds like we've been lucky enough to have you at GDS for a couple of years now, and Himal, we've recently lured you over from another part of government. What is it that appeals to you both about working at GDS?   Louise Ryan:  Oh wow. Such, such a big question. There's so much to like about GDS and working in digital in government in general, really. I always like refer people to the GOV.UK Design Principles and the Service Standard. So if you take a look at that, it's all about doing things the right way, about doing things for everybody, having a multidisciplinary team focussing on what the actual problems are, not solutionising. Building services, not just websites, so we continuously improve things. All sorts of that stuff, but also the tech we use is really cool as well. So it's, it's pretty modern stuff: lots of Infrastructure as Code, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery and lots of automated testing. Yeah, I mean, I could go on for a long, long time, but this is a, you know I think it's a brilliant place to work and I love it.   Louise Harris:  And Louise, just, just for our listeners who are maybe less familiar with Government as a Platform, or what we call GaaP, can you just run us through a bit what it’s all about?   Louise Ryan:  So Government as a Platform [GaaP], is a suite of digital services designed to meet common needs which can be quickly integrated into-into other service teams services. This helps reduce duplication, variation and it-it enables other digital teams to build their digital solutions much quicker, much faster, much more efficiently.   In terms of what the various services do, Notify is, is an extremely busy service. It's used by, I think around 4,700 other services. That's around 1000 organisations across the public sector using it. So it's scaling at around 120 new services joining every month. So that is, that's pretty big. So in, in, in terms of the last year, they've seen a-a 25 fold increase in volume of messages. And so that was a massive scaling challenge for the team that they, they just really smashed out the park. They're mostly hosted on the PaaS, which is really cool, and it's kind of asynchronous architecture so there's a lot of queues helping us process messages. You know it enables us to scale and enables us to retry when things break. So it's,it's good architecture.    [GOV.UK] Pay take payments, take card payments for your digital services. It also, you can also use Apple Pay and Google Pay to pay for stuff. I think one of the main selling points of Pay is how much we care and test about the, the journey, the paying experience for people who use assistive technologies. So we really put a lot of effort into making sure it works really well for everybody. That's built mostly on Fargate, and, and uses some you know, it's got to be PCI [Payment Card Industry] compliant, so it's a, it's a complex, necessarily complex architecture. It scales really well and it's been used by, I think, over 550 large services now, and it's processed over a billion pounds.   [GOV.UK] Platform as a Service: you host your, you can use Platform as a Service to host your web apps in the cloud without relying on, without worrying about the infrastructure underneath. So you can build your app in Python, Ruby or Rust or pop it in a container and then push it up to PaaS. And there you go, you've got a running app in the cloud. Also provides a bunch of backend services you can use. So backend services means databases like PostgreSQL, things like ElasticSearch or queue services like simple queue service from AWS. That's, that's the scale of this is, is, is very impressive. It's being used by just over 121 organisations and between the two regions in London and Ireland that it's hosted in, it's hosts, it's running around 2,800 apps at the moment. And they're processing an amazing amount of incoming requests: so we've got an average of around 300 requests per second coming through those pipes. So that's quite cool.   And then we've got the Design System and the Prototype Kit Team. The Design System look after GOV.UK frontend, which is that set of styles, patterns and components that other teams use to build their frontend. What's really important about those patterns and components is that they've been researched extensively and tested extensively across a vast array of digital devices and operating systems and with real people and with assistive devices. So we can be sure that they're, you know they're, they're working. So obviously we do that once so service teams around the country don't have to keep doing that work. It really is an open source project as well, the Design System. It actively seeks contributions from the design and frontend communities a-across, across government. And that's, that's really cool. And it's yeah, it's used quite. It's, GitHub tells me it's, it's in use by over 2,600 other repositories.   Louise Harris:  That must be so cool to be involved in work that’s being forked off, and used in so many other contexts. Is it safe to say that there’s some stuff that you can get done at GDS that maybe you can’t get done elsewhere?   Louise Ryan:  Yeah, I think it is. We are at the centre of government, being part Cabinet Office. If we're not going to do it in the centre, then it's not just gonna magically happen elsewhere in government. Those tools exist so other service teams can-can really benefit from having things done once really well in the centre so they don't have to keep reinventing that wheel. They can-they can just get started really quickly and benefit from all that work that we've done really well just once.    Louise Harris:   And it's not, it's not just teams kind of in and around the UK government that are getting to benefit from that approach either right? Some of our code has also been forked by international governments to do their own thing too. What do you think are some of the sort of GDS led technology success stories out there?    Louise Ryan:  Oh, wow. Yeah. So there's lots of examples of this happening. So take, for example, Notify. That's been forked and used by the Canadian government and the Australian government to create their own notification platforms. And, you know, t-t-that doesn't just-just happen and then stop. We continue to collaborate with those teams working on this platforms so we can all learn from each other. And it's not just about the tech either - that's really important thing. So obviously Notify have developed a whole bunch of operational practices and services around the service itself. So we share, we share those as well and you know, help people figure out what works, what doesn't.   And it's not just Notify. So PaaS. PaaS works with, that's Platform as a Service, they work with their equivalents in-in Australia and, and the US government to share best practice. And then you've got the wonderful Design System that's been forked by a lot of countries. And not just other countries, but other authorities within-within the UK. So, for example, my own council, Wiltshire Council, they forked the Design System and used it to build their own website. But in terms of other countries. I think it's used in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the Netherlands. So, yeah, massive, massive success stories of-of re-use of our, of our hard work.   Louise Harris:  Wow, so lots to be proud of. And Himal, I guess same question to you - what is it that drew you to GDS?   Himal Mandalia: I think GDS is sort of interestingly positioned right at the centre and, and being sort of highly visible, like it can be an exemplar of what good, sort of long live teams, services looks like. So all of the things that are articulated in the Service Standard, in the Technology Code of Practice, you know, we-we work to those ourselves since we-since we developed them. But I think what we've quite clearly put out very recently in the GDS strategy for the next 3 years, the core 5 missions, particularly the ones around GDS being the place, essentially the shop that builds and runs the common components and platforms that the rest of government build services on top of. I think that is now clearer, clearer than it's ever been. And you know there's something that, for me anyway, when I was thinking about a bit of a career change last year, drew me and I thought: this is a really interesting time to come in and join. There's a-there's a real sort of transformation of energy in the air again.    Louise Harris:  So it’s great for our teams to know that their work is having an impact not just here in the UK and for our users, but also around the world as well. And Himal, like you say to be part of that, what did you call it, transformation buzz? I think that kind of flies in the face of the idea that jobs in the civil service are sort of slow or old school right?   Do-do you think there are other misconceptions about what a technology job in government might be like, versus what it’s actually like at GDS day to day?   Himal Mandalia:  I think what's interesting here is, you know we're about a decade into a transformation journey that's bringing in the sort of technology practices around Continuous Delivery, being Agile, having autonomous self organising teams and a lot of the-the technology driven processes that surround that in the ways of working. And I think it's easy for us to lose sight of the uneven distribution and maturity of this across government. So I think it's, I think it's interesting because government can't be seen as a, as a monolithic thing. I think if you're outside and you're thinking of you know, if you're, if you're a Developer or a Reliability Engineer or a Technical Architect and you think, you know you want to work in government, you want to work in the public sector - and that could be local authorities as well of course - it is, it is a very unevenly distributed landscape of maturity. I mean, I would say we're pretty much at the, at the higher end of the maturity curve at GDS here, of course, because what we've been doing for the last decade. And I think what's exciting for me as someone that's worn many hats and played different roles in this sort of journey is: it's, it-it can be, it can be rewarding to work somewhere where a lot of the basic capabilities, the fundamental enablers are already in place and you can deliver value and work with teams. If you consider GDS, then you would find something that's much more a-akin to a sort of modern sort of conventional tech company.   Louise Harris:  I think that digital maturity curve point is such a good one. Because yeah, with almost 10 years under our belt GDS has definitely been through a lot that foundational and capability building stuff that some other organisations might still be grappling with, and I think that gives us a kind of view on what their pain points are so we can shape products and platforms that are gonna meet their needs at different parts of the curve.   And I think that actually leads us quite nicely to the next thing that I wanted to chat to you both about.    So our regular listeners will know that earlier in the year, we launched our new strategy and centred it around 5 key missions. If you missed it, check out our May episode of the Podcast where you can hear our Chief Exec, Tom Read, talk more about that.    But in essence I suppose, over the next few years, our focus boils down to this: helping to create services that just work for the user. So no matter how complex the underlying systems are or how much these people know about government, we’re going to make services that just work.    So mission 4 in our strategy that’s looking at how we can make sort of effortless for departments and agencies to digitise their services by looking at centrally-developed common components.    Louise, maybe you can tell us a bit about what’s happening in that area?   Louise Ryan:  I mean to sum it up, you know, we've got a bunch of really cool services that are already providing value. So as a piece of work, that's ongoing to just make sure they keep delivering value and can scale with the increasing usage that they experience.   We're also you know, obviously building on top of that and looking what else we can do to meet user needs. One exciting part of that is the work we're doing in the collecting information from users team. So that team is well, I think it sums ups, sums up its work. It's...you know, we want every single form that's published on GOV.UK to be accessible. That's huge. A lot of the forms on GOV.UK at the moment are published in PDF or, or other document formats. They present challenges, especially to-to users who, who need to use assistive technologies such as screen readers or magnifiers. And actually completing PDF online is-is no easy task either. It's pretty difficult. Whereas completing an online form is a much better user experience and hopefully much more accessible. So it's, that is a, that is a massive problem space, and a really interesting one. And we're just entering an Alpha-Alpha phase with that team. So it's, yeah, so it's very exciting challenge we presented with ourselves in, in GaaP.   Louise Harris:  And I don't think we can really kind of understate the scale of that challenge, because I think everybody around GDS we treat PDF's a little bit like our, a 4 letter word. But the team blogged recently and I think equated that if, without doing this work, if we were just relying on the existing kind of form building systems that were out there, it would take government about 70 years just to convert the PDF's that already live on GOV.UK, which are obviously growing, if not every day, then certainly most weeks. So super important work. Was there anything that came out of the discovery that-that surprised you folks?   Louise Ryan:  I think-I think you've, you’ve hit the nail on the head. It's the scale of the challenge. And it certainly surprised me. But when you, when you think about it, it's, it's not that surprising, actually, because there's teams right around government that don't have the digital capability to do anything else. This is, you know PDF's and other, other document formats are the tool they have, so that's the tool they, they have to use. So, again, GaaP is uniquely placed in the centre of government to do something about that. And that's, that's hopefully what we'll be able to do in the coming years.   Louise Harris:  So it sounds like through Government as a Platform right now, we are already kind of solving common problems at scale. But, but what about - and sorry to make you solutionise on the fly here Louise, because I know that everything we do is evidence based and user led - where do you see the next, beyond the collecting information from users work, do you see any themes emerging about where that next common problem is that GDS might want to solve?   Louise Ryan:  Yeah, so we are doing some research on this, so, but I don't want to pre-empt that, but I'm, I can, you know, there's, there's stuff we already know that, that service teams have to just keep doing over and over again. There's you know, there's thin--complex problems that don't seem complex until you really dig into them. So things like a postcode lookup. Service teams have to keep doing that, is-is there a way we can, we can provide a solution for that in the centre?   Louise Harris:  And that's all such important stuff right if we, if we want to deliver the transformation at the scale that we, we all want to see.   One of our other central focuses is going to be this idea of joining up services so they solve whole user problems even if that means spanning multiple departments. Himal, I guess - as the platform for government services - GOV.UK is going to be pretty fundamental to how we get that done right?   Himal Mandalia:  Yes, so it's interesting because people can get a little bit, a little bit confused about what we mean when we say GOV.UK. So if we think about it as sort of layers of the onion: the sort of widest layer you have, what is known as the GOV.UK proposition. So that, as a user, you know, you go somewhere, you see a website, you see something that's branded with the crown and the stylings around that: that's a GOV.UK site. But it could very easily be a transactional service you interact with for--to do ev-everything from paying your taxes to a prison visit to renew your driving licence. And those are all on the GOV.UK proposition. So they feel like a single website as you move across them. And we have mechanisms like the Service Standard. If you work to that, that means that you're going to end up with a pretty joined up journey.   But for me, the-the-the layer of GOV.UK that I work on and the technology I'm responsible for, that's the GOV.UK content. That’s-that's the main page that you come to when you go to www.GOV.UK. That is a large platform with hundreds of thousands of pages of content that we-we hold and a set of tools that we run for thousands of users across government to create, to offer that content, to edit it, to manage it, including our internal content teams here. And we also run technology, which, of course, delivers all those pages so they-re, they're available globally.   Louise Harris:  And right now, a lot of that content is quite static right? Because we need to publish it and serve it quickly and then hold it in the cache and serve it up again over and over.   Himal Mandalia:  Yeah, exactly. GOV.UK delivers a lot of content right now, but it's usually...it's relatively static, it's relatively flat content, it's pages. And one of the things that we're exploring now is if you have an account, if we, based on consent, if we know some things about you - your approximate location or other attributes we have - we may be able to tailor that content. We may be able to personalise it, to put content in front of you that's relevant to what you're doing. Maybe even be proactive, send you personalised notifications with of course, a full consent model and opt in and easy opt out around that.    But in order to do that, in order to personalise the content or even have content chunked up so it can be contextual, so a different snippet is mixed in based on a tag or some piece of data that we're using to construct that, that, all of that will require a fundamental re-architecting of GOV.UK's applications. So the front end applications need to change dramatically in order to stitch together that content in real time. The way that content is stored, the way it's structured, the schemas that are used to determine how that content is broken down into small snippets, how it's tagged, the taxonomy - all of that needs a rethink and redesign. And the publishing tools themselves, the tools that are used by the service essentially that is used by the content creators, that experience they have in not only creating content, but the taxonomy they're applying to it, how they're tagging it - all of that needs a rethink and a redes-redesign as well.   So that sounds huge and it is. But it's not a sort of big bang, all at once programme of work. This is an incremental and iterative stream of work, like, like how we do everything, which is going to, which is going to be done bit by bit. The interesting challenges that we are talking about rebuilding the ship while there are people in it bit by bit. And this is very much that Ship of Theseus metaphor right? We're replacing the planks, and when we're done, it's going to be a very different looking ship. It's going to be a ship that does very different things. But we're not even completely clear exactly what it looks like, but if we really extend the metaphor, we do have a good idea of where we're going.   Louise Harris:  And that personalisation agenda that you talked about there Himal, it sounds to me like it's going to ma-make [laughs] the site work a lot harder. I mean, we're already processing thousands and thousands of kind of transactional services, but this sounds like a real shift. You talked about the GOV.UK Account functionality as well, which obviously we piloted last year and had, I think, about 50,000 people sign up for that as part of the Brexit Checker, Brexit Transition Checker. We’ve obviously been iterating that software ever since. Can you tell us a little bit about where we’re at now with Accounts?   Himal Mandalia:  So what we've done to test the hypothesis with the Brexit Transition Checker and the-the prototype account functionality, which which has been amazing, which has been an amazing learning experience because we have had, as you, as you mentioned there, 50,000 people sign up, but because we're working off of an architecture and an infrastructure set up that doesn't support this yet, we have done those as, as a separate applications, which we've used, we've hosted in, in Platform as a Service, in PaaS actually, one of the products Louise mentioned and is responsible for which is, which is great, just to be able to use our own tools for things like this.    But in order to have that as part of GOV.UK's core architecture, to support more of that personalisation, that's what we do need to have that re-think, that re-design and that re-architecting of all of our frontend apps and our publishing tools and the content platform.   So I'm currently working on the future platform services and architecture strategy for GOV.UK. So all of the things I've just mentioned there are going to be sort of written up in plain language around what we're thinking of. And I-I view GOV.UK breaking out into a few really simple long term value propositions or services and platforms, and they are: presentation, or the frontend, what you experience as www.GOV.UK when you go there; the publishing service or tools that our thousands of users across government use; a content platform, that engine, that heart of content that does all the heavy lifting; and underneath all of that, the infrastructure platform that runs the applications, the databases, all of those things. And really looking to put an emphasis on the content platform, that engine of content and trying to move to a world where we can almost think of GOV.UK as a, as a sort of headless machine, that it does have a frontend, but really the most prominent part is the functionality that does all the lifting. Because in future there may be an app, there may be other ways, we may be syndicating content - these are all things we want to test. But having the flexibility and the ability to do that is, is vital because the way people, the way people interact with services online is quite different now to how it was a decade ago, and so we need to move on and have a much more Agile, much more flexible architecture that lets us meet users where they are rather than having a, just a website. You know we don't, we don't live in that era anymore.   Louise Harris:  So sounds then like we want to shift to a, a bit more of a channel agnostic approach then. Louise, you’re a Technical Architect, what’s your take on Himal’s just said?    Louise Ryan:  Yeah, it's-it's a bit daunting actually [laughs]. Himal won't mind me saying that. You've got, it's a, it's a big job to re-architect such a big and important platform as GOV.UK. It's, it's really exciting. And it, you know, it's, yeah, you won't be on your own Himal. You know, the rest of-of GDS is-is very interested in this work as well, and there's crossovers right? Government as a Platform is very interested in, in what's happening with GOV.UK Accounts, because we might be able to use those features in our services. So for example, [GOV.UK] Pay: when someone's paying for something, if they're signed into their account, maybe they can save that, that payment method if they want to. Yeah, just solutionising on the fly, because obviously we'd need to research that to see if it was a, a thing people would be interested in. But, but obviously we you know, we're keeping a very close eye on what, what Himal's up to and, and wanna be part of it where we can.   Himal Mandalia:  I-I 100% agree with that, Louise. I think the thing here is, I think the, I think what we're doing with our, with our Digital Identity programme, with the GOV.UK Accounts, it really is, it really is that golden thread. It is the thing that ties all of this together. It does, it does offer the cohesion between all of our products and services. So we blur the boundaries between them. And I think notifications, payments, the publishing, the content delivery, all of that, and then, and then you bring into that all of the services across government as well, they're all tied together through your account. So what you end up with ultimately is a completely seamless experience, a citizen shouldn't need to, shouldn't, you shouldn't, it shouldn't even occur to them that a separate group of people delivered this piece as opposed to another bit.   Louise Harris:  As you say some kind of huge, huge programmes of work coming up, sounds like we're probably going to need a few-few additional crew. If-if people are interested in getting involved in this, where-where can they go to find out more?   Himal Mandalia:  So if you search for GDS careers, you'll find our careers site. We have a, we have a campaign going to hire Developers right now, but more will be launching soon. I'm particularly keen on trying to see about bringing juniors in. We need, we need more, we need more juniors into to-to-to not only be working with our teams, but also to be engaging in things that we've done previously at GDS like firebreaks, where you get that little bit of free time to experiment and come up with things. And of course, there will be a range of more senior roles as well. They'll be, they'll be more roles going out across-across the board at all levels.   Louise Harris: So there’s lots of really great new job opportunities coming up across GDS. For people who might be interested in that, what would you say the culture is like in our teams?   Himal Mandalia:  I think having, having just come through a crisis, or crises, where we were highly visible and doing a lot of work to surface essential guidance around Coronavirus, we've had to organise ourselves around mission focussed teams, which has meant a-a lot of the work that we planned and even written about, I-I think I've, since starting you know, I've dug into some of the blog posts that we put out in 2016 and 17, amazing planning around publishing tools and platform that we were not able to pick up or continue because, because of emergency work, urgent priorities around Coronavirus and some of the work around Brexit as well, those are all things we can return to now.    H aving gotten to know my technologists community over the last 5 months, I think there's a real appetite to return to some of those longer term value streams - so working on services, being in long live teams, and what I'd mentioned earlier around things like a publishing service and content platform. You know, really giving groups of people, not just Developers, but Designers and everyone involved in a multidisciplinary team, that agency and that long term ownership over a problem and o-o-over, over the improvement of something. So I think some of that excitement is coming back now. And so, yeah, it's, it's a great time to join. It's a very active community.   Louise Ryan:  I-I don’t think I’ve shouted from the rooftops enough about how important long-lived autonomous teams are. They really are the, the reason that Government as a Platform has been suc--as successful as it has. There, there's people that are really committed to these services, really understand the problem spaces inside and out and just, yeah, deliver amazing results and outcomes as, as a result. And yeah, this is, this is not just from a technical perspective that you know, we-we-we couldn't build the tech we build without the help of our, our user-centred design colleagues and product and delivery.   We are...the selling points from me I mentioned earlier is-is how we work in teams, as a unit, how we figure out with things that we-we should be working on, making sure they are the things of most value and really understanding the problem space and then developing the tech to solve those problems. And that, that, that way we work is to me as a technologist, is, is very compelling and, and reason alone to join but...Also we use some really modern tech - so our programming languages in GaaP are, are Python, Java, Node and then we've got some, some other programming language such as Go in the mix, but we build stuff on, on really modern technologies. So a lot of stuff on Amazon Web Services. As I said, we use modern practices like Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, we do a lot of automated testing so we can deploy with confidence multiple times a day to make sure, yeah, we're getting our stuff out there quickly and getting people to actually use it as fast as possible.   And hopefully that's a, that's a compelling story about why GDS is a really good place to work. I didn't actually mention the culture in, in all of that. And I think that's what you actually asked me. But the-the agile culture here is-is to be open, to be transparent, to share what you're working on with others, and that can be through show and tells, through pairing, through having your code open in, out there on GitHub. I really, I really like the culture at GDS. It's a kind of, you know, when I was in the office, come up to my desk and ask me anything kind of thing. No question too silly. Yeah. I think it's a, it's a lovely place to work.   Himal Mandalia:  Yeah, I think the only, I think the only thing I'd add and Louise said it all there really was: you know, if you a technologist that's passionate about open source development and the technologies that were mentioned there and you, if particularly if you're old enough, you have friends like me who are old enough to remember when open source was very much the underdog, and you know, we were, we were all sort of part of a rebel alliance trying to-to do a good thing. It's amazing that this is now converged with trying to do good for the public as well. So. I could, I couldn’t think of a better argument to sell it than, than that: you get to use cool tech, do open source stuff to do good for tech and do good for the public. I mean, what more do you want, really? And we pay pretty well as well.   Louise Harris:  That's pretty cool, and if people want to find out about our code, which obviously we publish openly where we can, where can they find that?   Louise Ryan:  All our code is published on GitHub. So you need to go to GitHub. And it's Alpha GOV.UK is our organisation. It's all in there. I can't remember how many repos that there are, but there's a lot [laughs].   Louise Harris:  Okay well if anybody’s got a quiet Saturday afternoon, and they fancy digging into literally thousands of repos, head over to our GitHub to do that.    Yeah so there you have it, an inside look into how technologists at GDS are doing the hard work to make it simple for users. Some seriously impressive and exciting stuff, and if you want to stay up to date with what's going on, please do follow us on the GDS blogs and check out our GitHub. A reminder that if you're a Developer, Site Reliability Engineer or a Technical Architect who fancies a new challenge as part of a great team doing work that impacts literally millions of people, you need to search GDS careers because we're hiring now.    Louise, Himal, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and chat to me today. I don't know about anyone else, but you have been left with the impression of our technologists acting like a bevy of swans, calmly and gracefully gliding across the surface, totally belying all of the hard work and energy that's happening just underneath to make sure we're headed in the right direction. And thank you to you, our listeners. Remember, you can find all episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all major podcast platforms. And our transcripts are available on PodBean.    Goodbye.   Louise Ryan:  Thank you, bye.   Himal Mandalia:  Thanks everyone.

GDS colleagues and the BBC’s Matthew Card discuss Black excellence, offer advice to young Black people interested in a career in tech and share how allies can help. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I'm Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Like previous episodes, this one will also be recorded via Hangouts as we're all working remotely now.    Today's podcast topic is Black Excellence in Tech as part of the GDS celebrations to commemorate Black History Month. The GDS Black Asian Minority Ethnic Staff Network at GDS have planned a calendar of events for the third year running. This year, many of the events are themed around Black excellence. To learn more about this, particularly in the tech sector, I'm joined by 3 guests: Samantha Bryant, Matthew Card and Chuck Iwuagwu. Sam, could you please introduce yourself to our listeners?    Sam Bryant:  Hi, everybody. I am Samantha Bryant, or just Sam, and I am an Associate Delivery Manager on the GovTech Catalyst Team, and also one of the co-founders and co-chairs of the GDS BAME Network.   Vanessa Schneider:  Awesome. Thank you, Sam. Chucks. Do you mind introducing yourself?   Chucks Iwuagwu:  Thanks Vanessa. Hi everyone. My name is Chucks Iwuagwu. I'm Head of Delivery in GOV.UK. And before becoming Head of Delivery on GOV.UK, I was Head of Delivery on the Verify programme.   Vanessa Schneider:  Great. Thank you, Chucks. Finally Matthew, could you please introduce yourself?    Matt Card:  Hi, I'm Matthew Card. I'm a Software Engineer, also a Senior Leadership Team Advisor at the BBC. I also run a motivational platform called Release D Reality, and I've started a Black tech network group as well.    Vanessa Schneider:  Fantastic. Thank you, Matthew. So from what it sounds like, you all carry out important roles in digital, data and technology areas of your organisations. Would you mind sharing how you've gotten to the positions in your careers that you are in currently? Let's kick off with Sam, maybe.    Sam Bryant:  Ok, so I didn't come into the Civil Service thinking that I would land a tech role. And my initial idea, plan wasn't to be in the Civil Service for ages, but having found a tech role that is a non-techie tech role, I literally like found my niche, and that really encouraged me to stay in the Civil Service for longer. So I moved from the Cabinet Office to Government Digital Service, where I developed and progressed to being an Associate Delivery Manager. And I absolutely love the role. And also because I'm super passionate about D&I [diversity and inclusion], I formed the BAME Network here at GDS.   I would say the most important thing about my role was just like being surrounded by like-minded people. So at GDS, there are a lot of people who are in the tech organisation but not necessarily holding tech roles. And so before I became a DM, I was able to liaise with different managers in GDS, get an understanding for the work that they do, and it really aligns with my natural skill sets. And because I had a natural love for technology anyway, it, those two things aligned. So that's how I became an Associate Delivery Manager.    Vanessa Schneider:  That's really cool to hear. Do you mind sharing if you've had any experience outside of the public sector, outside of the Civil Service maybe?   Sam Bryant:  I have, but not in a technical role. So I've worked for, I would call them like e-commerce tech companies like Groupon. And prior to that, I did some teaching, like all of my other jobs prior to this were very diverse and not necessarily aligned with what I do right now. But I also did a degree in English, which is really helpful when you're in a tech role, because communication is key, whether we're thinking about how we make our communications accessible, and when when we think about how we communicate with all stakeholders or how we communicate tech things to non-techies.   Vanessa Schneider:  That's really great to hear, yeah. It's, I think it's probably really important to hear also that you can do a variety of things before you come into the tech sector and that it's not, you know, a waste of time, perhaps. Chucks, do you mind perhaps sharing with us how you came to GDS and to the position that you are in now?    Chucks Iwuagwu:  I'm a bit like Samantha in, in the sense that I didn't set out in my career to work in, in tech and certainly to work in IT project management and in delivery leadership. This might surprise you, but my background is in biochemistry. I-I did a Master's in pharmacology and subsequent degrees in, in, in chemistry and, and making, manufacturing drugs, and got involved in clinical research. But it was actually my work in clinical research that led me to tech. I was involved in a clinical research project, and was particularly involved in writing specifications for the development of the application, the IT system, that we used in clinical research. And that was what sort of introduced me into business analysis and working with developers and those who write codes. I just made that transition from working in that sector into - I really enjoyed, you know, creating, you know, applications, IT systems. From then on, I moved to work initially for the health department in Scotland for NHS National Services Scotland. And then through that to several local authority. And, you know, ended up in GDS exactly about a year.   I-I became an agile enthusiast about 11 years ago, became a scrum master 10 years ago, and started working in agile scrum and have been working in agile delivery, scrum, kanban, different flavours of agile, for about 10 years. I was, just so people know, I'm an independent consultant, and working as an independent consultant in an agile space have enabled me to meet some of the cleverest people I've ever met in my life.    Vanessa Schneider:  That sounds like a really wonderful experience. Well, finally, we turn to Matt, obviously we've heard from perspectives from people who work in the Civil Service, but the BBC is obviously also a very big institution in British lives - so it'd be really cool to hear how you wound up working there as you do now.    Matt Card:  So what, I, so I did the traditional route. I started out not knowing what I wanted to do. So I took a like a gap year and I was just working in retail for a while, and then I decided to go back to university and I picked, I wanted to do comp-something in computers. I found myself on a computer all the time trying to work things out. So I thought let me go and learn how to work, to do stuff. I did a sandwich course - so one year was out in, in the real world. And then I came back, completed the degree, and then I found a job in London at a, a small company. And then I got made redundant out of my first job, cried my eyes out, you know, because, you know when you get your first job and you're like, 'oh, this is amazing'. Because I didn't know what to do before I found out what I wanted to do. And, you know, so I thought, I thought this was it. And then I got made redundant.    And then I was looking for another job, and then I found the BBC - it was really interesting because I didn't actually want to work at the BBC because I, of the perception of what I thought it was going to be like. So I went for the interview and it blew my mind - it was like 'wow' - because it was so different, it was like all open plan, like loads of floors and you could look out on the, on the whole building and everything is like, 'wow, this is amazing'. And then the second interview that I had the, the person who interviewed me just said, 'oh, so tell me, what's your favourite site?' And I was like, 'wow, this is a really interesting question'. So I was like YouTube - ‘cause it was 2009 so it's like YouTube was massive - and I was like just everybody can share their content, it's just amazing, you know? And he was like, 'right. It's a really good answer'. He asked me some other questions, and then I got the job, and I've been at the BBC ever since. I went, I started in London and I moved up to Manchester with the BBC, and I'm here now.     Vanessa Schneider:  That sounds like it was a really positive experience. Do you think that doing your degree was something that made you more successful in your career?    Matt Card:  Yes and no. I think that my skills outside of, of the computer science field has really helped me. Like because, as I said, I worked in retail for a very long time, so my customer service skills really helped me because, at the end of the day, the users are customers, right? You just have to explain and you have to have difficult conversations with people to say, 'you can't have that right now'. You know that's got nothing to do with tech - that's just you can't have that right now. So, so it's, it's more about conversations and, and learning to talk to people and dealing with, dealing with personalities as well. That's, that's was really important.   Vanessa Schneider:  Brilliant, thank you so much for sharing. So a question to both Chucks and Sam, do you think there are any kinds of supports that you've had in your life that were a factor in you being successful in your current jobs?     Sam Bryant:  So is there anyone who has supported me in my life and helped me to be successful? I would say well, initially my parents in terms of installing values into me that have made me want to be the best version of myself, who have, they've made me feel like nothings impossible to achieve.    They helped to install values in me, make me bold, confident and just positive. And they made me a nice young lady who's good at communicating. And then along my career journey, I would say there have been a few people in GDS who have really encouraged me, especially along my journey to becoming a Delivery Manager - so I'm always thankful to them. And I feel like some of it's really internal and kind of spiritual, like, yeah, I feel that my connection, my religious connections helped to install lots of confidence and self-belief in me that helped me to naturally just push forward for myself as well. So, yeah.   Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah, that's actually a really interesting fact, you're talking about religion, because I think support can come not just from people, but also from networks for instance. So, yeah, Chucks, if you've got any reflections on that, I'd be really interested.     Chucks Iwuagwu:  Again, very similar to Sams. I'm a person of faith and, a person of Christian faith, have very strong connections with with the church. And, you know, people might some people know this, but I'm a first generation immigrant. So family network has always been at the heart of everything. I'm the youngest of seven - and my brothers and sisters have just sort of spurred me on to to to strive for excellence. One of the things I have experienced being a first generation immigrant is that I am conscious that I have been given an opportunity, and being in this country for me is, I am, you know, eternally grateful, you know, that that those who were here before me have built a platform that has enabled me to-to flourish. And I have this sense that I have to contribute to making that, making this place a better, a better place, not just for myself, but for all people, you know, all people irrespective of their backgrounds and irrespective of, of, of where they've come from.   But on GDS particularly I have found the support of the Deputy Director for Delivery absolutely of great value. I-I you know, this person has become somebody who has inspired confidence in me, has enabled me to understand the Civil Service. And I think everyone, BAME or not, need to have people who inspire confidence in you. You know, the director of GOV.UK has some great ambitious plans for GOV.UK - and each time I talk to her about these things, I feel, wow, you know, you've got these ambitions, which means I can have ambitions for for things, for people, I can do this, you're doing it, I can do it   Vanessa Schneider: Yeah, it sounds like mentorship is a through line. So obviously, I hope you are happy where you are, even if it's a way station on what's next, but if you could change one thing about your career, would you? And what would it be? I think Chucks, you've got something on your mind on that front, don't you?   Chucks Iwuagwu:  Yes. I actually set out to becoming a doctor. If I can change something in my career now, I'll tell you what it is: I-I would not leave, you know, delivery, I would not change career at all. What I would like is to have had, or to still have the opportunity to gain a bit more learning that would enable me to do a bit more teaching, you know, and coaching. That is the bit of my job that I love so much - is that, is that bit of helping people, supporting individuals or teams in-in realising their potential. I-If I could change anything, it would probably spend some time learning how to be a better teacher.    Matt Card:  Sometimes I think everything happens for a reason, you know? And I struggled in a part of my career for, for a big part of my career. Some of that was because I moved up to Manchester by myself. I moved away from my support network. I learnt about resilience at the BBC and went on a course and it was really good. And what I realised is that I had lost a lot of confidence. And, you can break resilience down into many different parts, but there are four components, main components of resilience, and that is: confidence, adaptability, purposefulness and social support. And we all have a different varying range of all of these things. So I can safely say that most, most of my social support - and that's a lot in like our community, right? You know, it's our parents, Christian Faith, used to go church all the time, and that, we're centred around family, very centred around family. Other cultures too, not saying we're the only one. But I moved away from that. So then when things got a little bit tough, they got really tough, you know, so struggled for a bit.   But I would say if I could change anything, but I don't know if I would, it would be learning and realising my strengths earlier, because I've got a lot of strengths, and learning that failure isn't a bad thing. I took me a very long time to learn that failure isn't a bad thing.   And also, actually, Chucks mentioned it I think: the, the mentors. I didn't believe in mentors before I went on this resilience course, I thought I was fine. And then I was, when I went, I was like 'whoa. I'm not fine'. So it's like mentors - I work with a gentleman now called Phil Robinson. We just delivered a talk on Tuesday called 'Decommissioning: an engineering guide to decommissioning systemic racism', and it went down really well. The-the first person, Mark Kay, was the first person who I spoke to and explained to him exactly how I felt. You know, the pressures, the, the extra cognitive load that we go through, you know, the running things through a filter just to make sure that we're saying something quite right, wondering what if we're saying something quite right, wondering if someone in the room is shutting us down because of the colour of our skin or something like that - all of these things were rolling round. He was the first person that said, 'you know what? That's not right, you know. And I think we, we definitely need to do something about that'.    Some people don't think it's like their place to get involved - Like 'oh, who am I to do this?' When I was like, no, no, no, no, help, we need your help, right? We need allies.   Obviously my dad. He's, he's the reason why I'm who, how I am right now, you know. He always used to talk about fellowship and all of this, and I'd be sitting 'oh no dad. What you doing that?' But now I'm talking about fellowship because you know what he used to do: he always used to ring up and talk about, and, and find out how people are doing. What do I do now: everyday when I wake up, I go on WhatsApp:' how are you doing? How you doing? How you doing?' And I just c-continue my day. So dad's very, very strong influence to me.    Vanessa Schneider:  There are a lot of nods in this conversation through what you've been saying, so I can see everybody's relating to it. And it sounds like you have a really great network of people supporting you, rooting for you - I'm, I'm very happy to hear that. Sam, any reflections from you? If you could change anything, would you?    Sam Bryant:  So I think Chucks and both Matthew have reflected on things that I would agree on and things that have resonated with me. In addition, I probably would have changed how quickly I took my career seriously. Initially when I joined the Civil Service until I found my niche which was delivery management, I nat-I didn't like necessarily see all of the opportunities that were directly in front of me. So even though I was doing my job amazingly, I wish, I wish, I would like to say I wish other people like saw it and was like, 'you know you're, like you could do way more than this. And someone did eventually, but it was like years later. But taken the onus on myself, like, I wish I was just like, like, 'let me see what else GDS has to offer'. And like, you're definitely interested in technology, and there are probably some non-technical roles that would suit to the T. So to, I wish I just did that kind of investigation piece a lot quicker.   I also don't feel like, I feel like everything happens in time and everything happens for a reason. So I'm sure my energies were invested elsewhere that it needed to be at that time. So, yeah, now I'm super focussed and I know exactly what my position is, where my skills lie and what I can offer to the tech industry as a Black female. So, yeah, that would be mine.     But like Matthew said, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. So failing fast was hard for me to learn because I want everything to be perfect before I try out. So yeah, learning about that has literally revolutionised my life inside and outside of work.    Vanessa Schneider:  Just a quick dive into it before I go on to the next question, but you mentioned being a perfectionist and I think Chuck's had a similar sort of conversation earlier. Do you think that is to do with your cultural background as well, that you feel like you've got to meet expectations and surpass them maybe?    Chucks Iwuagwu:  Yeah, I-I mentioned one of seven children, and the least qualification amongst us is Masters degree. My mother was a headteacher, my father was a Nigerian government permanent secretary. So, yeah, there, there is this thing about the drive to achieve excellence. My mother would say, you know, whatever you become, you would have to become by yourself. Nobody would give it to you. Go out there and get it. You know, don't wait for opportunities to be given to you - create them, take them, demand them, you know.    It's, it's unacceptable, you know, in my cultural background to, to sit on your hands. It's completely unacceptable. I cannot even conceive it. I really can't.   Vanessa Schneider:  Those are really motivational things to say. I could see a lot of nodding with that again. I think that, yeah, Matt and Sam might have related to being raised like that maybe - I'm speculating. Let's hear from you both.    Sam Bryant:  Yeah, for me, my perfectionism definitely comes from my parents and my upbringing. My dad would always be like, if you get 99% on a test, like maybe other families would be like that’s an A, that's amazing, my parents would be like, where, what happened to the 1%? But I still, I-I don't necessarily wish I was brought up any different because I love who I am today. But I definitely know how to amend the things I was taught and implement them maybe in like a different, more creative way to get the same or better outcomes. So, yeah.    Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah, it sounds like you've taken the best lessons from what you were raised like and the best lessons of what you know now and fused them together. That sounds really nice. So, Matt, any reflections on your family?     Matt Card:  Yeah. So, so I would come from a different angle. It's very interesting. So you get very different variations, and this is really good because I find that with stereotyping, everybody thinks that all Black people are kind like the same and we're not - we're very, very different you know. There's so many different cultures, you know, so many different countries involved in this thing. But one of the things I've always said to people is that, I can speak for a lot of people that I know who look like me - that they've always heard, you have to work ten times harder than your counterparts. And it's like one of the things that it's, it's confusing, and, and I know my parents were trying to put me in a good position so that I would succeed, but then what that actually does that actually starts to set you apart from your counterparts. And it can have a damaging effect because then you go to school and you're like 'right, ok I am different. Why am I different?' And then you're getting confirmation bias by, you know, so like your teachers who don't understand your culture. And unfortunately, that's where a lot of people don't know who they are yet, and they're learning who they are. So, you know, then these confirmation biases are happening, you know on both sides.    So it's, it's kind of like, like what, what Sam said: y-y-you take what the good things and then apply it. Do, do agile with it right - put out some, get some feedback on it and then come back and then say, 'no, no, no. Let's change that here. What's the requirements? What, what was the user feedback? You know, I mean, was the stakeholders one?' And then then go forward again, you know? So that's what I would say.    Vanessa Schneider:  That was really cool. So our next question, we've had a bit of a look into your past just now, but I was wondering if you've got any idea about your future. Where do you see yourself in 5, 10, 20 years? I don’t want to make any guesses about how old people are so I'm keeping it open for you so you can pick how far into the future you're going to look and what you think you'll be doing at that point. How about we start with Sam?    Sam Bryant:  Yeah, so professionally I will be some sort of delivery manager head somewhere. I would love to work for a company that has a product that naturally is a part of my everyday life. And then using my experience in private sector come back to public sector, because I do feel like there's a lot we can learn in government from private sector organisations. But again, in turn, there's a lot that private sector companies can learn from government. So I'd love to like bring my expertise externally and then learn some stuff there and bring them back to government.    I also see myself just being more of a head in the D&I [diversity and inclusion] space, especially where it comes to like being influential in terms of Black women in tech, Black people in tech in general. I'm going to be, or I already am a part of Mathew's network. So it's amazing that he's bringing together Black techs, so Black people in tech, so I am absolutely loving that and I'd love to do a lot more. I'm also really into working with organisations and schools, help them to be more diverse and inclusive. And I've done like, this summer, I did, did a session with some teachers with an organisation called Success through Soca, and we ran some sessions to give them ideas on how they can incorporate Black history into the curriculum. So that's really exciting, and I hope like, in the next 5 years we've really established a solid programme that can impact and revolutionise how we do stuff as businesses, organisations, schools, just like Matthew said, like we really can unpick a lot of the stuff if it really is just systemic. So, yeah, those are two highlights of where I see myself in 5 years.   Vanessa Schneider:  I love it. You're already manifesting your future. That's great. So, yeah, Matt obviously your network was mentioned. What do you see in your future?   Matt Card:  All right, I'll try to keep this quick. So more of the same. Straight up, more of the same. So I'm a software engineer right now. I'm applying for tech role, tech lead roles right now, I'm going to jump because I've realised my power, realised my strength. So engineering manager next, don't know how long that's going to take, probably 2 years on the trajectory that I'm on. And then probably moving up to CTO, Chief Technical Officer, stuff like that. Continue my public speaking and do more of that.     And then beyond there, I'm want to create more networks - I'm, I seem to be really good at creating networks and motivating people, so I just want to do more of that, and, and bringing out the culture. So as I said, I've got a motivational platform, I'm doing work on D&I inside and outside of the, of the BBC. Then I'm running a think tank called Future Spective, where we think about the future. We think about what's going-because a lot people are thinking about the past - which we have to we have to understand where you're coming from, right, and for the present, because there's a lot stuff going on now - but I want people to think about the future as well: what's going to happen in 25 years, 30 years time? How is that going to translate? We, we all need to link up and talk to allies as well, talk to majority groups - just start that conversation. So it's all about that conversation.    Oh, this might sound corny, but I'm going to change the world.     Vanessa Schneider:  I love it, you got to aim high, you gotta aim high. All right. Round to you Chucks.     Chucks Iwuagwu:  I'm conscious there'll be a lot of people who listen to this who think, 'oh my goodness, you know what's in it for me in the next 5, 10 years?' You know, Black people. And I'm not you know, I'm not embarrassed to say that I'm not quite sure.    You know, I-I hold this role as Head of Delivery for an organisation that has over 200 people in it. I know that I enjoy teaching. There is a lot that can be done in terms of education and and raising awareness. I, you know, when I said I'm very religious, I'm actually in my spare time a Church of England Vicar. So I do a lot of preaching on Sundays. And, and, and I have become this person who wants to bring people to a place where you realise that there isn't actually a need for discrimination. You know, there isn't actually a need for that. There isn't you know, there's no need to feel threatened by somebody who's slightly different from you. So I know what world I want to be in in the next 5, 10 years, I'm not quite sure my role in that. I'm also very ambitious. I know I'm qualified to be a director of a programme but I'm not quite sure how I'm going to navigate all of this.     I have a vision of the world I want to be in - it's an inclusive world, is an open world, is a world where, you know, government services can be accessed easily. I want to educate people about diversity and educate people about how to run good projects, good projects and good programmes. How all of that shapes in the next 5 to 10 years, I really don't know. And, and it will work itself out. But one thing I have to say and I want to say to any Black person, particularly up and coming people who are not sure of what the future holds, is don't do nothing. You know, you may not be sure of what what it is you're going to do and how you're going to get there or your role in all of this, you may not be sure of that. One thing you cannot do is just sit back and feel sorry for yourself. Ask questions, come out and say, these are the things I enjoy, how does this progress? How does this, how do I make a difference? Don't shy away. I don't know what I'm going to be doing in the next 5 years, but I'm not going to not explore what is out there.     Vanessa Schneider:  Great. Wise words. Matt anything to add for the future in Black excellence in tech?     Matt Card:  Yeah, I just want to echo everything that Chuck just said actually - just keep moving. If you don't know what you want to do, do something big and perfect that because then you've got the transferable skills. You see how we all spoke about what we used to do and now we just do this, and it was just a, it's just a iteration - there we go again - an iteration on what we used to do in a different form, right. So I've got them laughing.     So I'll just roll into my like what I would tell kids is: learn how you learn. That's the simplest thing I can say - just learn how you learn. Don't let other people tell you how you learn because the school system can only teach you in a certain way, they've only got a certain capacity. So you need to learn how you learn what works best for you. Don't discredit the other ways. Keep them there as well and use those as well, because you have to learn, you have to pick up the knowledge from different people, and people then communicate in different ways to you, so you have to understand how they communicating to you, but learn how you learn best.    Vanessa Schneider:  Very simple. I like it, very straightforward. Yes, Sam, anything from you that you want to pass on to the future stars?    Sam Bryant:  I would say just work on having self belief. I feel like a lot of things come from within, and I feel like it's really good to work on yourself. You can be around the right people and still not feel great within yourself. You really need to build up your self-confidence so that you don't feel intimidated in any room that you step into, even if you lack knowledge, because having the self-confidence will give you the power and the confidence to ask the questions, the silly question, the question that no one wants to asks, but to be fair half the people in the room want to know the answer to that question. When you just have that natural energy about you, you will naturally just go on that website and look for that networking event or go on YouTube and type in 'learn more about agile' or go on YouTube and find the video about how to get involved in tech or anything that your, you, your heart desires.    So you really work on yourself.     Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you all for your amazing advice for any Black people who are interested in working in tech, data, digital, all that space. Do you have any advice for allies? What can we do to support Black colleagues in the workplace? Do you have any examples of exceptional ally action that listeners can take on and think about how they can put it into action maybe.    Matt Card:  It's roughly the same thing. Have self-confidence because what happens on the other side is that people are like, 'oh I don't want to make a mistake'. Take the same approach that we do here - fail fast. You're going to get things wrong as long as it comes in the right energy, you're going to be able to move on and people who are BAME are going to be able to understand where you're coming from, if it comes in the right energy and, and with the right intent.     You know, do your homework, do your reading - there's loads of resources out there now. Talk to people. But there's, here's one: be slow to speak and quick to listen. Learn from other cultures because you can't manage people from other cultures if you don't know their culture - it's, it's it's almost impossible. Right. Sorry, sorry you can't lead people. You can manage them, but you can't lead, and leadership is different, right. There's a big gap in the middle, so someone has to lean forward first right. You know, some of the peers might be behind the curve and might not understand. Just talk to them as well, you know. Do things, just get yourself in the right frame of mind, practising gratitude is is is number one and just being confident as well. Chucks was confident to say that he didn't know - it's the self belief, he's just like, 'I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm going to something.' And that's amazing. If you hear it's slightly different to saying, 'oh, I don't know. I'm not going to do anything'.    Sam Bryant: For me I would say the first thing is accept that you are an ally. Within this context of race, if you are not Black or BAME, you are an ally, and you should treat that like really seriously. Like I don't have a choice that I'm Black. You actually don't have a choice that you're an ally. And I just feel like everyone in the workplace should take that really seriously. So just start taking action from today. If you are not BAME and you really want to help out, I just feel like everyone should feel like this: everyone, it's everyone's problem to resolve. That, I think that's my main message like, as long as you're in a workplace, you should just be trying to ensure that it's a great place for everyone to work. Whether your BAME or whether you're not.     So yeah, like Matthew said, just reiterate the fact that there loads of re-resources out there. Go to your BAME network in the first instance. If you are an organisation that doesn't have an ally network, like GDS is really good at the moment, we literally have an allies network, but if you don't go to your BAME network and see how you can help out or just be, the be the bold person to start an allies network at your own organisation and bring your peers along the journey too. There's so much you can do, especially do you know what, in line, line management. I know Matthew said there's a difference between leadership and managing and there is, but really take your role as a line manager seriously. Literally, like all of my line managers in my career have not been BAME, and that always like I'm, I'm really always nervous about it because I really want my manager to be a champion for me naturally and take the role really seriously. So if you are a line manager, particularly for, for someone from a BAME background, really do you take that role seriously. Because in a lot of organisations, when it comes to like performance awards and performance ratings BAME people do tend to score the lowest. So we really need to work on how we are line managing BAME colleagues, encourage them, help them to recognise their skills. A lot of us want to be perfect, help us to work on the fact that we can fall fast, encourage us to just go and do random things in the organisation that naturally white colleagues are like naturally, more like risk averse - we're not. We, we don't want to like take risks because we feel that we might get in trouble. Or, yeah, just make sure the environment for your line reportee is one where they can just like flourish. Yeah, that would be my advice.     Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you, Sam. Finally, Chucks, any sage words for you to allies in the workplace?    Chucks Iwuagwu:  Yes, absolutely. I'll start from some, something my father used to say: there are two types of people in the world. Those who listen to hear what you're saying and those who listen to respond. Unfortunately, I think that a lot of people who are not a minority in this country, listen to respond. They're not listening to hear what I'm saying, they're listening to, to give me the script, the answer as per the script. You know, there isn't active listening to hear what, what I'm saying. And when you're not listening to hear what I'm saying, you miss you know, the things that I say that I never say. So you miss you know, hearing what I'm saying, that I don't have the words to express.   A lot of, a lot of our white colleagues don't know how to listen to us. I had to learn how to listen too, I lived in Scotland for 14 years. I had to learn how to listen to my Scottish friends, not because of the accent, that's nothing to do with the accent, it's, it's, it's to learn expressions, colloquialism - all of that, what people say and what they mean. And then I moved down south. And as a-a-a-a Glaswegian friend of mine gave me a thing that has what English people say and what they mean. You know, when I was go-Chucks this is not Scotland, you're going down south and people are going to say one thing and mean another thing. And I had to learn how to listen.     The other thing I want to say is, as an ally, please don't make assumptions. Assumptions, very bad things. You know unless you're making it in the context of project delivery and you can make assumptions and you come back it up and you can, you know, have your plans in place to respond to the assumptions. Don't make assumptions. Don't assume that because I am you know, I am Black, I-I-I don't have sunburn for instance. You know, that was one had to deal with today with somebody. You know, 'Do you burn? Do you get sunburn?' Assumptions, very bad things. If you don't understand the cultural manifestation of a behaviour, do ask. You know, Matthew's just said it all: read, ask, ask Google.   Vanessa Schneider:  That's a lot of material for us to go through as allies for you in the workplace. You've given us plenty to work with. Thank you so much for sharing. I can see that it did take a bit of a toll on you as well. And I want to acknowledge that, that we shouldn't be putting this burden on you. But thank you for sharing these resources and tips nonetheless.   Hopefully less draining and more exciting for you, this is more about sharing the resources for fellow Black people working in tech. I was wondering if there is anything that, any events or organisations, that you wanted to give a shout out to that listeners can look at, and we can include the details in the show notes and the blog post that accompanies the episode.   Matt Card:  So I just wanted to say, you know, I've got my motivational platform - Release D Reality. The Future Spective is, is brand new - so just watch out for, for that. So that Black tech network group: you can contact me on info@ReleaseDReality.com or MatthewCard@gmail.com.   Chucks Iwuagwu:  I would encourage an eye out for several agile meetups - I’m not sure in the current circumstance with Coronavirus. They’re usually advertised on key major network websites and Twitter, on Twitter as well. So people will do well to look out for such, and where possible, please a-attend. ‘Cause it’s, it’s a really good way to network and to learn and to hear what’s, what’s happening in the industry, what other people are doing, some of the ideas that are coming through.   Sam Bryant: Firstly I’d like to shout out GDS BAME Network, because I think we're doing some amazing things as a community and the anti-racism network as well that has formed this year - I would just like to shout them out because their work has literally been amazing and has changed, changed the culture in GDS essentially, and that has been extremely positive.  I'd also like to shout out Success through Soca. I work alongside them doing, using Black British history to help to build leadership skills within schools, colleges, and we also work with organisations to help them transform the organisations and allow them to be more diverse and inclusive.    Another organisation I'd like to share, or give a shout out to is Pink Dynasty. They're doing some amazing work in the tech space. They have events with people who are not specifically techies, but want to get into a career in technology. And as I’ve said, I am a Delivery Manager and typically that’s not like a super techie role but definitely is a way to encourage people who have a passion for technology to not be dissuaded into getting involved.    Vanessa Schneider:  Amazing, these sound like really worthwhile organisations and I really hope that our listeners take a look at them and get involved with them as well.    Thank you so much for sharing those and also for coming on today. You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major pad-you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean.    Goodbye.   Chucks Iwuagwu:  Bye.    Sam Bryant:  Bye.   Matt Card: Bye bye.