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Sheeny96

Honestly, the people behind the scenes of gov uk are doing gods work. See nothing but great stuff coming out of there.

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I fully agree.

Two of my favourites:

Holiday API I plug into every ecommerce site I work on:

https://www.api.gov.uk/gds/bank-holidays/#bank-holidays

Domain Email Security checker:

https://emailsecuritycheck.service.ncsc.gov.uk/check

Please share any other favourites!

The fact that the UK government's bank holiday API has bunting advice just makes my day.

Where did you find this? Is it part of the API response?

Would be fun to use this for some digital decor at home.

Next bank holiday is Christmas so I've got some time to build something!

EDIT: Just found it in the JSON; shame, was hoping it would contain bunting patterns/colours.

https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json

If you go off this issue it looks like they use tinsel at Christmas, although I'm not sure where that logic is.

https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/issues/678

I'd be interested in taking a look to see if they use different bunting styles for different occasions, my thought process was that I could create some form of digital-bunting in my home to indicate various occasions.

As a(n) (English) Brit, I believe this could be quite an excellent indicator of whether I should be drinking Guiness, Tea, Whisky, Pimms, Champagne or Mulled Wine at any given time of the year. I suppose it should live in the Kitchen, near the kettle, or the wine cooler.

It looks like that's only false for Good Friday, which I suppose makes sense that as a Christian you don't "celebrate" the execution of Jesus.

Indeed, there are others such as the queen's funeral. Bunting is reserved for celebrations.

I love that the bank holiday one tells you whether or not bunting is appropriate on that day. It looks like the ones for which it isn't are ones commemorating death, like the state funeral of Elizabeth II and Good Friday (Crucifixion of Jesus).

Yes: a plain JSON endpoint with no authentication! It's the perfect way of exposing this kind of data.

I wonder how the backend works... Is it a microservice which queries over a globally distributed 'bank holidays' database, which has a frontend for some admin to add/remove bank holidays, and perhaps a custom approval workflow to approve/deny bank holidays, and maybe a system to make new bank holidays 'go live' on a certain date/time?

Or is it just a static file someone wrote in vim and checked into git which got hosted as a static asset?

https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/blob/master/README.md

It's a static file manually written (and slightly post processed).

DVLA VES. Never miss a car tax payment or MOT again.

https://developer-portal.driver-vehicle-licensing.api.gov.uk...

Have been impressed with their work for years, the majority of my governments other IT bits are awful.

100%. Well maybe 99%. The tax free childcare website is very frustrating.

It seems to be taking a while for the framework to propagate to more independent arms of the government; as well as your example, for the (e.g.) DVLA a lot of the top level information-only pages are in the new framework (and also reside on www.gov.uk), but if you click any link to a form you get taken to the DVLA subdomain (motoring.dvla.gov.uk) and the difference is stark.

For the DVLA the site isn't so bad, but I definitely get that slightly disconcerted feeling that something is going to go wrong while you're filling out this important, official form? Which I don't get at all in the new framework.

It's not actually the interface that's the problem. It's the flow.

* you have to answer dumb security questions constantly

* you pay money in (a lot of money) by direct bank transfer with a long reference code. If you get it wrong I imagine the money is just gone. Not very reliable.

* you have to "set up a new payment" every single month because it's designed under the assumption that your bill is identical every month and it never is

Actually there is one really annoying interface thing - when you set up a one-off payment it suggests a date that is one month from now, instead of one day from now which is what you want. All it needs is a "tomorrow" button. I've missed payments several times because of this.

Oh and it tells you you can't set up a payment for today after you've submitted everything instead of on the date selector.

> the people behind the scenes of gov uk

Those would be the people commonly refered to as incompetent traitorous woke lefty cultural marxists refusing to do the will of the people by the fair and balanced media.

That sounds like the UK media alright. If you take one look at a newspaper stand on any day of the week you’d think the sky was falling.

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