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cangencer

For the curious, here is the tech stack: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govuk-launch-colophon/

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> The majority of our applications are written in ruby, based on either Ruby on Rails or Sinatra.

> A few components are written in Scala and built on top of Play 2.0

> We’re running Mapit from MySociety which is built on top of Django

Thank god it is not another Drupal based government site!

wordpress this time

To be fair, Drupal et al. are great for throwing at non-technical users and letting them create their own content.

Absolutely agree. But for an entity like the UK govt having plentiful resources, it would be sheer laziness to go with a solution like Drupal due to ease in initial setup. Besides, most Drupal sites look sort of kludgy in appearance.

You do realize the "appearance" of a site has nothing to do with the underlying stack, right? A Django site can appear like a Rails site can appear like a Drupal site can appear like a ...

You can argue for differences in behaviour, sure; but appearance?

I disagree. Drupal makes it hard to do easy things, creates a lot of unnecessary HTML, and makes it very hard to do things not The Drupal Way.

Thank god the people who consistently failed to deliver large websites based around whatever the stack is didn't manage to get involved. The ones I had to work with all seemed to gravitate around education budgets, but I'm sure it's not the only dept (I'm looking at you SchoolsWeb).

So every fad platform you could possibly imagine. I reckon that the savings are up front but will cost a fortune in the long run and there are virtually no staff in the UK who can support it.

Really? Aside from Scala and RabbitMQ I know at least a dozen developers with skill sets in the rest of the technologies, and that's in my very small neck of the woods in the darkest North East England.

Demand is greater than supply in London, which is a big issue. It turns people towards high salary bidding wars, which to be honest offsets the saving.

I haven't noticed a huge shortage of Ruby on Rails devs in London, and the average salaries don't reflect a major shortage either. According to itjobswatch.co.uk, the average Ruby salary is the same as the average Java salary in London.

I also thought the idea of hiring cheap, sub-par developers as a way of saving costs was somewhat discredited by now.

Thats advertised rates. The actual rates are higher or you lose people before you get a chance to offer a place to them.

We employ starting at £50,000 and we still lose 80% of our candidates to better cash sums.

Hello, I'd like to get in touch with you. Would you be OK with sharing your email address please?

Cheers.

I know a few aspects of the .gov redev have been held outside of London, so they might look at that as a possibility.

(I think it's unlikely, most uk.gov seems to be focussed on London, which is natural and annoying)

When I interviewed with the GOV.UK people in January it turned out that the seemingly good salary they were offering was actually about the same as I'm currently paid up here in Leeds. However, the pension element of the compensation was relatively generous.

Yes that doesn't surprise me.

If you've lived in London for a number of years, you'll realise you need real cash up front to survive here as the transport and accomodation costs are sky high.

My rent for the 3 bed terraced house in South West London I moved into on Saturday could get me a 7 bedroom mansion with several acres of ground near Leeds...

> there are virtually no staff in the UK who can support it.

On the contrary, for at least one of the less well-known platforms, RabbitMQ, they are based in London: http://www.rabbitmq.com/contact.html

Saying that you can't get ruby devs in the UK is also not true.

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