GOV.UK
Digital Marketplace
Making it easier to buy better stuff
Between 2015 and 2017, I worked on the multidisciplinary team building out the Digital Marketplace for the Government Digital Service.
The Digital Marketplace was built to make government technology procurement faster, simpler, and more fairer. The Marketplace enabled public-sector buyers to easily purchase cloud services and find small or midsize suppliers without defaulting to the same handful of giant technology vendors.
By July 2018, more than £4.22 billion had been spent through the Marketplace, with more than 90% of suppliers being small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs).
I worked mostly in Python on a collection of chatty microservice Flask applications. Behind the scenes, the Marketplace used Elasticsearch, was deployed on AWS, and was tooled up for daily deployments.
Working on the Digital Marketplace taught me an enormous amount about building public digital services properly: start with the problem, work closely with users, ship something, learn from it, and keep improving it as you go.