Blog

  • Ruby-on-rails: deleting all data from a table

    During development, you might find yourself needing to delete everything from a specific database table to refresh your data. You could drop the whole database and bring it back up again with rake:db:drop, rake:db:setup, but that’s slow and indiscriminate. Instead, boot up a console and call delete_all on your model: I’ve been using this quite…

  • Major vulnerability found in OpenSSL: “Heartbleed”, and what you should do about it

    A major vulnerability (CVE-2014-0160) has been found in OpenSSL, which is the software that many people use to make secure, encrypted connections to websites. A security problem has been found that allows an attacker to read a small portion of the memory of the computer using OpenSSL. This could enable an attacker to see things…

  • Not for profits and ‘digital’

    I went to Barcamp NFP a couple of weeks ago. It was incredibly refreshing to see so many people working so hard to bring their organisations up to speed and to share things that work with each other. A special word of thanks to Laila (@spirals) for organising such a fantastic day. On a personal…

  • Barcamp NotForProfits

    This Thursday is BarcampNFP, and we’re going along to talk about doing digital properly. We’ve had lots of these conversations with digital teams recently. Last week, Lily went to a department to give an informal talk about how to build the best product for your users by starting with research and testing what you build.…

  • Civil Servants are people too

    Working at dxw for the past year has introduced me to the phrase “special little snowflake”, usually preceded by “no-one is a…”. This covers most projects that I come across, but it isn’t to say that there aren’t large and important specificities to problems. More often than not, if you’re looking at the same problem…

  • #SPRINT14

    Harry and Alex were at SPRINT14 this week. It’s the Government Digital Service’s annual show and tell for broader government, showing what’s been achieved and laying out the direction of travel for the next year. Throughout the day, it was incredibly encouraging to see how seriously Government is taking the transformation of digital services. We…