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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…

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…

Being busy has almost become a way of life at dxw. Which is mostly in way of a mea culpa for not having blogged in the last few months. We’ve grown a huge amount in the past three months (we’ve more than doubled in size) and have been working hard on a few from-scratch projects as well…

We recently hired a couple of Ruby-on-Rails developers and we repeatedly came across some key things missing from candidate CVs. The following are critical for developers with little commercial experience, but probably apply across the board. Side projects It’s now a fact of life that in a the creative industries you have to be able…

Websites, I like to think, are like cakes. They’re about cooking in proportions, they’re as many types as you have moods and I like eating cake (metaphor failing). Like a good sponge, digital products really only have a few key ingredients: Technology is actually the easiest bit of the puzzle (bearing in mind that this…

It’s been a busy week in government digital, with the Sprint Alpha presentation at the start of the week catching everybody up to how far the GDS has got in building their new raft of transactional services. These services are the order of the day; they’re the priority for GDS and for us too: we’ve…