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Update tinsel bunting
- sph 3y agoAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Even government websites can use a little personality. I'm enjoying the thought of the two or three offended British citizens that will call in to complain the Christmas decoration are offensive to their sensibilities. Or the commit that gets reverted because legal doesn't want to deal with such a liability.
- Waterluvian 3y agoAt scale there’s people who complain about everything. It’s not really worth pre-self-distracting over.
- swores 3y agoAlways interesting to see which subjects get more people complaining about hypothetical complainers than actual complainers...
- slekker 3y agoCurios why the org is named "alphagov"
- andrewmcdonough 3y agoAlphagov was the original name of the project to see whether it was possible to do digital government differently in the UK. When it proved successful, it went on to replace many of the existing government online services, but the org name seems to have been left with the original name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gov.uk#Alphagov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gov.uk#Alphagov
- Waterluvian 3y agoI really love how much size SVG can save and you get a “cleaner” option when it comes to browser zoom levels and whatnot. Has anyone had any success with SVG generation from a clear raster image?
- okennedy 3y agoInkscape has a filter that's been pretty reliable at generating vectors from raster inputs.
- pbnjeh 3y agoIIRC, that is based on the utility potrace. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrace potrace worked just fine for me when I needed to digitize some drawings that became a prominent part of a business's graphic design. Maybe a decade and a half ago. Edit: I see now that Inkscape can do color by first decomposing into colors and then doing each of those separately.
- SamBam 3y agoThere are plenty of online services that will do this for you (I don't recall which I've used to recommend), and they generally work but require quite a lot of post-processing, mostly removing potentially hundreds of extraneous points, unless it's all easy straight lines and simple curves. Actually, I'll bet this would be a great place for AI to optimize.
- amitrip 3y ago[dead]
- RugnirViking 3y agoDepends what you want; Inkscape does it well for some basic tasks involving images with few colours, I've often thought about how it could be achieved better for artistic pieces
- infinityio 3y agoI used a copy of (desktop) Vector Magic several years ago - it's almost certainly not worth the purchase price today (and better software may already exist), but it did very reliably get me a reasonably close SVG from an original image
- telesilla 3y agoI used to put snow on our website when our company was young and we could update websites by hand, sadly now it requires a team of 5, QA and security level checks before a build ever gets into production. Sad days for the internet, but we did update our instagram logo with a little seasonal joy.
- timvdalen 3y agoI love all of our modern fancy build systems and pipelines, but it is sometimes frustrating to wait for three deploys across branches to finish running the entire test suite and rolling deployment for what is essentially a one-line change that you used to be able to do in 30 seconds by going into FileZilla.
- misterben 3y agothe image is neither tinsel nor bunting
- RugnirViking 3y agoHaha, yes. Its usually bunting, for other bank holidays (red blue and white flags) and it used to be tinsel for Christmas (but is now lights)
- matteason 3y agoI had a little dig into this in January - Christmas and New Year are the only bank holidays that get tinsel (now lights), everything else gets red, white and blue bunting: https://twitter.com/MattEason/status/1610240761047531520 https://twitter.com/MattEason/status/1610240761047531520 There's a 'bunting' property in https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json which drives whether the bunting is shown for any given bank holiday
- albertgoeswoof 3y agoThe gov.uk developer salary starts at 24k gbp, and averages at around 50k. How do they manage to hire and retain people, and create such a great service?
- el_oni 3y agoThey have really great pensions and mat/paternity leave and those sorts of benefits. You get some lifers that work there but they also get a lot of contractors and people that leave after a few years for a private sector job with more pay but worse pension. Source: work as a contractor in UK public sector
- red_admiral 3y agoThis doesn't apply across the UK civil service consistently, but for the gov.uk digital service in particular, I've heard they treat their employees really well. The pay may not be great, but everything else about the job is supposedly above-average.
- kypro 3y agoJust my experience, but their permanent staff are mediocre. A lot of the heavy lifting on gov projects I've worked on has been done by contractors and external agencies. Another thing I'd say is that £50,000 is actually a decent developer salary in the UK. Your average senior dev in London probably gets around £70,000 - £80,000, and outside London a senior dev might more typically get around £60,000 - £70,000. This also doesn't really paint the full picture if you're comparing to the US because in the UK if you're earning that "much" the government will take 40% of your income and you'll pay an additional 20% consumption tax on most things you buy.
- matthewmacleod 3y agoThis also doesn't really paint the full picture if you're comparing to the US because in the UK if you're earning that "much" the government will take 40% of your income This is not true. The 40% tax band doesn’t even start until slightly over 50k.