Thread by @RichardTowers

@GOVUK and @GDSTeam launched a service to help extremely vulnerable people get help during the #coronavirus pandemic this week.

Initial commit: 4:22pm Thursday
Live service: 10:53am Monday

Incredible work by an incredible team.

A thread about the tech:

Thursday: we're going to build a form. It's got to be live very soon - there's a letter ready to post, and if the service isn't live when people get the letter...

The form sounds fairly bread-and-butter, but GOV.UK is mostly content, not forms. So how? Government has a few low-code form builders, but GDS don't have a preferred one. We spoke to @MoJGovUK about theirs, and looked closely at a few others.

Requirements:

* Have excellent #accessibility
* Handle very spiky load
* Store very sensitive personally identifiable information securely
* Ship to prod in ~three days

Meeting those is a big ask from an off-the-shelf solution.

So let's build it from scratch. Our solution:

* Ruby on Rails (@rails)
* GOV.UK Design System
* GOV.UK PaaS (built on top of @cloudfoundry)
* Concourse (@concourseci)

All of this is #opensource software, helping us fight against #coronavirus

Thanks to @rails, we can build secure, accessible web applications quickly.

Thanks to the GOV.UK Design System, we're able to build services which are consistent with GOV.UK and have #accessibility at their heart.

Thanks to GOV.UK PaaS and @cloudfoundry, we can deploy services to the cloud at scale in minutes, and deploy changes with minimal downtime.

(We're pretty over-scaled at the moment - 30 instances with 2GiB RAM each. Why not though? #itsfreerealestate)

Thanks to @concourseci, we can create robust continuous deployment pipelines that let our team deliver working software to production quickly.

Thanks also to the dozens of other open source projects that helped us build, run and test this thing.

github.com/alphagov/govuk…

A few stats since we started building:

* 450 commits
* 189 pull requests
* 272 deployments to staging
* 63 deployments to production

Finally, thanks to the incredible team of people that worked on this, we were able to release on time. Since Monday, over 350,000 people have submitted their details, and people are now receiving help.

If you want to see what great developers look like:

github.com/alphagov/govuk…