This week I made our project open source.

Point 12 in the GOV.UK Service Standard is to make new source code open. Our source code used to be open (API, Client), but got locked up after moving to a new monorepo alongside some sweeping infrastructure changes.

Yesterday, we finally got to the point of being happy to make it open again:

https://github.com/ministryofjustice/opg-digideps

This is whole full service source code: PHP applications, design, infrastructure, end-to-end testing. All our pull requests are out in the open too. The only things that remain behind closed doors are Slack and JIRA, which often contain sensitive data (in all forms).

If you’d like to peruse more GOV.UK Service source code, many of our MOJ and OPG repositories are open source: https://github.com/ministryofjustice

Why is being open source important?

Some of the reasons I’m really happy to open source our work:

• Citizens can see what we’re building
• Citizens can contribute to what we’re building
• Anyone can reuse bits of our work
• It puts us in a public-serving mentality
• It encourages good coding practices (by increasing the impact of bad practices)
• It’s an opportunity to celebrate and show off our work
• It gives us access to free tooling available to open source projects

Summary

• Moved all of our alarms from email to Slack: we now have a workflow for assigning, resolving and communicating issues
• Open sourced our repository
• Tidied up a bunch of unused resources in AWS
• Finished the rollout of our database certificate updates
• A bunch more integration prepping, and discussing integration prepping
• Did some practical work around React Hooks and Context with JN; it’s come a long way since I used it last