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Making Critical Government Information More Resilient
on June 4, 2020
A roundup of steps that federal agencies, and other government entities, can take right now to improve the resilience of their websites and serve information more efficiently to the people that need it
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READMEs for you and me
on March 5, 2020
In software, a README is the documentation that tells you how to start using and understanding a new piece of software. In an organization, a personal README is a way to tell your coworkers how they can best communicate with you, work with you, give you feedback, and support you.
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Forms Resource for Federalist Users
on February 18, 2020
Need to put a form on a government website? Don’t want to do all the paperwork to buy an expensive CMS? Consider Federalist!
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Even with a design system, you still need a designer
on February 6, 2020
The US Web Design System gives flexibility so teams can build the right solution for users, but there are still plenty of design decisions that teams need to make to be successful.
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Measuring culture on our engineering team
on October 29, 2019
To be inclusive and effective, a team needs a culture where everyone is respected, treated fairly, and feels that they belong. We don’t see this diversity, equity, and inclusion work as a “nice-to-have” or optional.
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Automated scanning for sensitive information in the development lifecycle
on September 26, 2017
Often when developing open source software, and especially software that relies on outside services, you’ll find that you have to manage sensitive information. While there are a large number of things that can be considered sensitive, open source developers often deal with sensitive items such as API tokens, passwords, and private keys that are required for the system to function. Here's how we approached keeping this information safe.
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Federalist is out of beta and open for business
on June 1, 2017
If you're a program manager or a federal web developer you've probably been given a seemingly simple task: Create a basic website as part of a new initiative at your agency. The hardest part is often not crafting the content or designing the prototype, but getting the security and privacy compliance in order to launch and maintain the actual website’s compliance status. For that work, you might have to hire a contractor or put extra strain on your agency's web team. It shouldn't be that way.
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cloud.gov is now FedRAMP Authorized for use by federal agencies
on February 2, 2017
We’re delighted to announce that cloud.gov is now FedRAMP Authorized, which enables agencies to quickly transition their web-based services to efficient and easy-to-use cloud hosting. FedRAMP Authorized status marks completion of a comprehensive security and compliance assessment that enables federal agencies to start using cloud.gov with significantly reduced effort. cloud.gov is a government-customized hosting platform that takes care of technical infrastructure and security compliance requirements.
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Curate the best thinking available
on November 30, 2016
The Federal Source Code Policy, which was signed this year, requires federal agencies to inventory their custom software and make the inventory available for consumption and display by code.gov (among other things). The most pressing work in building code.gov was defining a software metadata schema — a way for agencies to format the details of the software they’ve built.
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What is static source analysis?
on October 4, 2016
Static source analysis is a way to quickly gauge the quality of source code and identify areas of high technical debt. But what IS static source analysis, and how is it useful?
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Pro tips for data-friendly regulations and proposals
on September 27, 2016
We launched the eRegulations Notice and Comment pilot this summer, and in the process saw some patterns in how our partner agencies write their regulations. In response, the eRegulations team prepared a guide to help agencies write regulations in a more data- and human-friendly format that would be easier to parse — thus saving time and money.
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Kanban for government
on August 31, 2016
Some months ago, 18F started playing with kanban as a way to manage and improve our processes. For the 18F Agreements team, adopting kanban has caused a dramatic positive change in how they manage their work.
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Patterns for managing multi-tenant cloud environments
on August 10, 2016
When 18F started, deploying government services into a public cloud was still fairly uncommon. However, everything 18F has built has been deployed into Amazon Web Services (AWS), including cloud.gov. Over that time, our AWS account has grown in size and complexity and we needed a new approach to make sure it remains manageable.
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Facts about publishing open source code in government
on August 8, 2016
We’ve put together a list of facts and references that will help you build the case for open source development in your team or agency and bust myths about using public code repositories. This post is based on our experiences at the federal level, but we hope it’s helpful for anyone working in government.
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Live streamed demos for exponential transparency and information sharing
on July 29, 2016
This spring, the eRegulations Notice & Comment team began building out a new feature set for the platform. To demo the work as we iterated on it, we faced a challenge of finding a way to do connect frequently with the dozens of interested parties. We settled on live streaming our demos through a video website that is accessible by most government agencies, doesn’t require extraneous plugins to operate, allows you to easily stream, but also automatically creates a viewable file afterwards at the same URL.
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Building better by building together with the Federal Election Commission
on June 7, 2016
How do you work iteratively and in the open in government? How do you transform an agency’s digital presence with agile and user-centered design? We’ve learned a lot about this as we’ve worked alongside our partners at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on beta.fec.gov, and we want to share some of those lessons here.
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How 18F handles information security and third party applications
on May 13, 2016
Today the General Services Administration’s Office of Inspector General (an independent part of our agency, entrusted with carefully inspecting agency operations) published a report on a mistake made in the configuration of Slack, an online chat tool we use. We discovered and remedied this issue a couple of months ago. We did a full investigation and to our knowledge no sensitive information was shared inappropriately.
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From spreadsheet to API to app: A better contract forecasting tool
on May 2, 2016
Executive branch agencies of the federal government are required by law to tell vendors if and when they plan on making purchases. The General Services Administration (GSA) was forecasting using a crowded spreadsheet containing dozens of columns and hundreds of rows. 18F helped create a new, open-source tool to display contract forecasting opportunities.
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Checklistomania makes it easy to keep track of relative tasks
on April 21, 2016
We use Checklistomania to help new and existing employees keep track of tasks that need to be completed. It’s open source and in the public domain: fork it, adapt it, use it — and let us know how we can make it better
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Looking at the different ways to test content
on April 19, 2016
We know good content when we see it, and we’re frustrated when we don’t. Keeping this in mind, are there ways that writers can quantify and measure their writing? We’ve looked at different tests you can run depending on the age of your audience.
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7 projects that state and local governments can reuse
on April 13, 2016
We’re starting to see state and local governments adapt or use 18F products or tools. Nothing could make us happier. Here are seven projects that would work particularly well at any level of government.
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Take our code: 34 reusable projects from 18F
on April 6, 2016
We encourage you to adapt 18F open source projects for your work and personal purposes, whether you’re a fellow federal employee or outside government. We’ve put together a list of some 18F repositories that might be especially useful to you.
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Happy Valentine's Day from the U.S. Web Design Standards team
on February 12, 2016
This Valentine’s Day, we’re sharing some love from the Standards, which include a library of open source UI components and a visual style guide for U.S. federal government websites. These tools — and these Valentine’s Day cards — follow industry-standard web accessibility guidelines and use the best practices of existing style libraries and modern web design.
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Tips for capturing the best data from user interviews
on February 9, 2016
User interviews are, at a minimum, an opportunity for you to ask your intended audience about their expectations, what their needs are and to get direct feedback on the work you’ve done so far or on what you plan to do. But an interview is only as good as the data you get out of it.
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How user story estimation helps my team deliver value
on January 25, 2016
At 18F, we believe that employing agile practices is the most effective way to build digital services. User story estimation is one of the most useful agile tools, and in this post, I’ll talk about how and why my team has been using it.
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Introducing the CSS coding style guide
on January 11, 2016
18F is releasing our CSS coding style guide, which specifies our best practices and rules for writing consistent, maintainable CSS code.
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Tips for adapting analytics.usa.gov from Tennessee, Boulder, and Philadelphia
on January 6, 2016
The city of Philadelphia, the city of Boulder, and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation have all adapted analytics.usa.gov for their own use. We recently talked to them about how they adapted the platform and what advice they’d have for others who'd like to do the same.
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How a bot named Dolores Landingham transformed 18F’s onboarding
on December 15, 2015
Over the past few months, we’ve released several products — including checklists, a handbook, and classes — to help new hires orient themselves to 18F. By far the most successful onboarding item we’ve released is a Slack bot that sends scheduled messages to new hires so that they don’t experience information overload during their first week.
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How we test 18f.gsa.gov
on December 11, 2015
As our blog got more complicated, we started making mistakes that were hard to catch before publishing. So we came up with a way to catch many of those errors, before they end up in your browser.
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An open source government is a faster, more efficient government
on December 9, 2015
Regulation 479 is the first Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) regulation on the eRegulations platform. This collaboration is an excellent example of how open source development helps 18F deliver valuable services to our clients and the American public.
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Using emoji for knowledge sharing
on December 8, 2015
Our coworkers are very, very good at documenting the things they learn in Slack, our chat program, because it’s part of their daily workflow. So I tried an experiment: I asked my 18F coworkers to tag messages that every new 18F employee should know with the :evergreen_tree: emoji.
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How the City of Boston is using GSA’s CALC tool
on November 10, 2015
We hoped CALC, a powerful labor category and pricing research tool from GSA and 18F, would save federal contracting officers time and money. Turns out, it’s also saving cities time and money. In August, we found out the City of Boston has been using CALC to vet pricing they receive in response to a request for proposals.
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18F’s best practices for making distributed teams work
on October 15, 2015
18F employees live all over the country, which means it's normal for the members of a project team to be spread across multiple cities. Because our teams are distributed, we've developed certain strategies for working well as a collaborative operation.
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What's in a name: Understanding and using government acronyms
on October 14, 2015
We have an acronyms section in our Content Guide, a resource we heartily recommend. Acronyms and abbreviations also have a ton of associated history and nuance, which we’re shedding light on here, hopefully to encourage other authors and agencies to think carefully about how they use them in digital tools.
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You shared, we listened — updates to the 18F Content Guide
on October 8, 2015
After we launched the 18F Content Guide, we received all kinds of suggestions for updates and improvements. Here's a sampling of some of the improvements we've made recently based on your suggestions.
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New Federalist platform lets agencies quickly launch websites
on September 15, 2015
18F’s new Federalist platform is a suite of tools designed to make it faster for government agencies to build websites that are secure, responsive, and accessible.
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An introduction to HTTPS, by 18F and DigitalGov University
on July 16, 2015
18F uses HTTPS for everything we make, and the U.S. government is in the process of transitioning to HTTPS everywhere. As part of this effort, we've recently partnered with DigitalGov University to produce a two-video series introducing the why's and how's of HTTPS.
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67 million more Federal Election Commission records at your fingertips
on July 15, 2015
The OpenFEC API added a filings endpoint as well as itemized receipt and disbursement data. This is the first major update to the API: The records we’re adding today are the meat and potatoes of campaign finance. You can see in detail where a campaign’s money comes from and where they spend their money.
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Tocking time
on May 21, 2015
I recently spent time helping with one of our internal frustrations — how members of 18F track how we spend our time. Ultimately, we opted to try rolling our own simple solution using Django: Tock.
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Layering innovation
on May 8, 2015
At 18F, we're changing the way government thinks about software, all the way to provisioning and deployment. To do that, we implemented an open source platform as a service for our developers. Here’s a look at how we created it.
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Pair programming: Why two heads are better than one
on May 4, 2015
At 18F, we frequently use pair programming, a technique where two developers work together on one screen. We asked two developers at 18F how they pair program and why they find it useful.
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The intersection of art and technology
on April 28, 2015
Earlier this month, I went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for the first time. I was there to see a special exhibit featuring the pop singer Bjӧrk, who is currently presenting a retrospective of her life’s work as a musician, artist and technologist. The retrospective spans back from her early beginnings as a childhood folk singer in Iceland all the way through to her most current album release.
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Hackathons: not just for folks who code
on April 21, 2015
A few members of the 18F team recently published an excellent guide on welcoming new coders to civic hackathons. In the same vein, we’d like to offer a list of strategies for including non-technical folks in your hackathons.
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How to welcome new coders to a civic hackathon
on April 3, 2015
The National Day of Civic Hacking is a great time to attend — or host your first hackathon. We’ve outlined some strategies for first-time hackathon hosts to ensure new participants feel welcome, and help them maximize their contributions.
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How to protosketch
on March 13, 2015
If you are a leading a project, ask for a protosketch. If you are a developer, learn to protosketch. Create imagination-sparking moments, in the meeting.
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Labor category descriptions for agile procurements
on March 10, 2015
Clients of 18F Consulting frequently ask for help defining labor categories for agile contracts. We’ve published these definitions in a public GitHub repo so other acquisition professionals can benefit from them, too. Read on for more details.
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How to use GitHub and the terminal: a guide
on March 3, 2015
At 18F we hire people from many different backgrounds and each new employee brings a different level of comfort with the specific tools we use on our various projects. The team that runs the 18F website recently started writing down the tools and processes that we use to update the blog and the code that runs the site. We're sharing that with you today.
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An open source tool for easier database testing
on January 13, 2015
18F is dedicated to spreading modern software techniques like rigorous automated testing throughout the federal government; we want to showcase how solid testing enables rapid, high-quality development. When the product is based on a large relational database, this poses a dilemma: the full production dataset is too unwieldy to duplicate to the test and development environments.
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Sketching with code: protosketching
on January 6, 2015
Meetings are boring. Prototypes are cool. Use the meeting to build the prototype. We call building a prototype in three hours or less "protosketching."
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