My work experience at Surevine

By Ben Girvan My GCSE year was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of the usual 6 weeks summer holiday to fill, I found myself having to fill close to 6 months of holiday whilst also being kept away from my friends. I had put a huge amount of effort into my GCSE revision … Continued

Creating GOV.UK styled React applications with govuk-react-jsx

The Coronavirus dashboard from Public Health England has used components which were recently open sourced by Surevine. They were developed in order to support a recent government project Surevine worked on which required us to build a GOV.UK styled React app adhering to the GOV.UK Design System. After evaluating the current open source options for … Continued

UKGovCamp 2020

Surevine sponsored UKGovCamp again this year and I was lucky enough to attend. UKGovcamp isn’t like a normal conference, in fact it’s the exact opposite. An ‘Unconference’ covering topics in the public sector digital space, with talks pitched on the day.​ Pre-event ​I popped along to the pre-event drinks the night before only to find … Continued

User Story Analysis

The Problem There is a very common interaction that I’ve seen repeated in pretty much every project in every company I have ever worked for. It’s when a tester logs a bug and the developer argues that, actually, it’s working how it is supposed to work. The result of this is often a passive aggressive … Continued

Protocol Breaks

Little Bobby Tables Back in the day – and even today – one of the most common security flaws in websites was a “SQL Injection”. It’s where an attacker uses especially crafted data and puts it into innocent-looking fields within a form that are then used to construct a database query. Or, as XKCD readers … Continued

DRY principle with docker-compose

An oft-repeated and sensible principle in software engineering is DRY, or “don’t repeat yourself”. Here we will apply this principle to Docker compose files.

Building Docker images with Maven

To package our application, we’re going to be using Docker. The natural build language for Docker images are Dockerfiles, so we will use Spotify’s Dockerfile Maven plugin. This post is part of the “Spring Boot Primer” series. To make packaging as simple as possible, we will bind the Maven plugin’s build phases to the default build phases, so … Continued

Spring Boot 2.0 primer

Spring Boot is a very popular Java framework for creating standalone, production ready web applications. In this series of blog posts, we are going to walk through using Spring Boot 2.0 to build and deploy a simple CRUD REST application.