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James Scott: Automating and engineering a better government
on September 12, 2016
James Scott's career has taken him from The University of Virginia to Intel before landing at 18F. Here, he has worked on cloud.gov and our diversity guild. His advice for people thinking about joining us: Do it.
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Nicole Fenton: A wordsmith joins the government
on September 6, 2016
Nicole Fenton joined 18F in September of 2015. Before 18F, Nicole was a content strategist at Facebook, Lab Zero, and Mule Design in San Francisco. She started her professional writing practice at Apple, where she served as communications lead for five years and helped launch the original iPhone and iPad.
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Mark Trammell: Unlocking the true potential of public service
on August 26, 2016
All throughout the summer, we’ll be profiling members across the 18F team. Mark Trammell joined 18F in May 2016 after stints at Twitter, Sonos, Digg, Paypal, and Obama for America. He currently works on CALC, a tool that helps the federal contracting community make faster, smarter buying decisions.
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Holly Allen: Helping engineer a better 18F
on August 15, 2016
Holly Allen came to 18F from Dreamworks Animation and the Public Library of Science. She joined 18F in pursuit of a way "to use technology to address big societal problems." After hearing about the U.S. Digital Service and 18F from US Chief Technology Officer, Megan Smith, she was inspired to join.
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Jacob Harris: From big data journalism to micro-purchase platforms
on August 2, 2016
Jacob Harris joined 18F in May of 2015 after nine years working as a developer at The New York Times. He currently works on the Micro-purchase Platform, which enables vendors to place bids on opportunities to deliver open source code that costs $3,500 or less.
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Bret Mogilefsky: Finding the big good in cloud.gov
on July 28, 2016
Bret Mogilefsky spent most of his career working in the game development industry. He came to the government seeking the best way he could have a big impact and do big good.
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Elaine Kamlley: A developer committed to diversity
on July 14, 2016
All throughout the summer, we’ll be profiling members across the 18F team. We’re starting with Elaine Kamlley, who is both a front-end developer and a member of our Outreach Team
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Illinois fourth grade class uses Every Kid in a Park to explore national parks and beyond
on July 6, 2016
One fourth grade class in Monticello, Illinois used the Every Kid in the Park website to learn more about National Parks and create a project for their school’s annual open house. We reached out to Washington Elementary fourth grade teacher Robyn Garrett to learn more about how she used national parks in her curriculum.
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Emanuel Feld talks about his visualization of government GitHub organizations
on June 16, 2016
What does the global government open source community look like? That’s the question that Emanuel Feld, a civic technologist in Washington DC, wanted to answer when he created a visualization showing how government repos on GitHub are connected and interrelated.
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The user-centered redesign of IdentityTheft.gov
on May 24, 2016
IdentityTheft.gov is user-friendly and intentional. We talk to the team behind the redesign about the user research that went into content and design decisions for the site.
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Content debt: What it is, where to find it, and how to prevent it in the first place
on May 19, 2016
Like technical debt, a failure to plan for content-related debt can cause major headaches down the road. In this post, I list some potential sources of content-related debt, list ways to identify it, and then share strategies for preventing it in the first place.
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Reimagining federal websites with the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards
on May 17, 2016
Andrew Miller, a user-interface designer and front end web developer working with Sandia National Labs, decided to use the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards to reimagine cia.gov as well as a prototype for a new mobile and web experience for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
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The day 90 kids came to code with 18F
on May 6, 2016
“One kid did not get up from his chair and every time he got a problem right, he did a little dance in his chair and then his mom would celebrate with him.”
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Thinking about the future of the post office: An interview with Amanda Weaver
on April 26, 2016
“Amanda Weaver’s team at the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General operates like a government think-tank. They write white papers on everything from 3D printing to the Internet of Postal Things. We talked to Amanda about the futuristic things her office is dreaming up for the post office of the future.”
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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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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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Three teams using the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards talk about their experiences
on April 5, 2016
In the five months since we launched the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards over a dozen websites have used components of the Draft Standards on their sites. Recently, we talked to three federal web designers about their experiences using the Draft Standards.
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Interesting things we learned from examining traffic patterns on analytics.usa.gov
on March 28, 2016
Ten federal agencies now have public dashboards and datasets for their web traffic on analytics.usa.gov. The dashboards show insights into how the public interacts with specific agency websites.
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How design consistency helps users navigate federal websites
on March 25, 2016
We launched the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards last September, and over the next month, we plan to explore various topics related to design standards. In this post, we detail how our user research informed the decision decisions we made.
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We asked over 100 of our coworkers: What have you loved working on?
on March 23, 2016
One of the best parts of working at 18F is the focus on meaningful, mission-driven projects. But which projects? We asked everyone across the organization to tell us what they've most enjoyed working on. Here are their responses.
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How to integrate the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards into existing projects
on March 23, 2016
One of the most common questions we receive is: Should I integrate the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards into my existing project? The answer is: it depends.
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We asked over 100 of our coworkers: What was your path to 18F?
on March 22, 2016
People have joined 18F from a variety of different backgrounds. We asked them to tell us how they got to 18F, and over 100 of them did.
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We asked over 100 of our coworkers: Why did you join 18F?
on March 21, 2016
Why did people make the decision to join 18F? We asked people on every team to reflect on why they came here.
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Making the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards better through your feedback
on March 16, 2016
Since our launch of the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards last September, hundreds of people have provided feedback on the project through GitHub issues and via email. We’ve received dozens of feature requests as well as over 400 contributions from the open source community.
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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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What we can learn from the Interior's social feeds
on January 21, 2016
One of my favorite projects is the U.S. Department of the Interior's work on social media. I recently asked Rebecca Matulka, the senior digital media strategist for Interior what she’s learned while running an online community that helps Interior achieve its larger strategic goals.
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18F's New Year's resolution: Be even more open
on January 7, 2016
We've been thinking a lot lately about our role within the open source community, and it's our 2016 resolution to increase the number of non-employee contributors to our projects, including: contributors with little previous experience with open source, and contributors to documentation, bug filing, and other non-coding work.
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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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We asked everyone at 18F to reflect on the most meaningful project they worked on this year
on December 23, 2015
2015 was a big year for 18F. We almost doubled in size, worked with 28 different agency partners, and released products ranging from Design Method Cards to cloud.gov. Internally, we improved onboarding and our documentation by releasing guides on topics as diverse as content, accessibility, and creating good open source projects. To mark the end of the year, we reached out to everyone at 18F and asked them to reflect on a meaningful project they worked on this year.
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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
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How we dramatically improved 18F’s onboarding process in 3 months
on December 1, 2015
Over the past three months, we’ve released several products that help new hires acclimate to our organization. In this blog post, we’ll detail what we did and why it works really well.
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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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This is how we start a new project from scratch at 18F
on October 6, 2015
We built the first iteration of Federalist in a matter of months. Today, we’re lifting the curtain and looking at what went into building the platform, so you can get a sense of what it looks like when 18F starts a project from scratch.
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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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Announcing the Agile BPA awards: A conversation about the process
on August 28, 2015
As the first Agile BPA awards are now being issued, we asked three members of the team about the process and the lessons they’ve learned so far.
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18F’s style guide for open source project documentation
on July 29, 2015
The Open Source Style Guide is a comprehensive handbook for writing clear, accessible, and user-friendly documentation so that your open source code repositories are accessible both internally and externally.
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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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18F: a great place to write
on April 29, 2015
We collaborate on much of what we do at 18F, from the way we work on code to the way we write our blog. Though we have a small editorial team, the blog — and our writing process — extends ownership to the entire 18F team.
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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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18F discussion: Should project teams code first or design first?
on April 3, 2015
Recently, three members of our team sat down for a conversation about when teams should start coding on a project.
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Making Twitter images accessible
on March 24, 2015
To make our tweets more accessible, 18F has started responding to our Tweets containing images, with another tweet explaining what the image shows.
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18F by the numbers
on March 19, 2015
Today, we’re celebrating our first anniversary. We wanted to take a look at some of the numbers that have helped define 18F during our first year.
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Does 18F pass the Bechdel test for tech?
on March 17, 2015
How does the Bechdel test, originally designed for evaluating works for fiction, apply to technology projects? To pass, a function written by a woman dev must call a function written by another woman dev.
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UX lessons learned from a procurement project
on March 6, 2015
UX designer Nick Brethauer talks about how user research better informs the products 18F builds.
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Making procurement easier: questions for developer Kaitlin Devine
on March 5, 2015
We recently sat down with Developer Kaitlin Devine and asked her a few questions about Discovery, a new product designed to make government procurement more efficient.
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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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Three 18F products that will help your workplace
on February 17, 2015
I’ve worked at 18F for exactly six days. During those six days, I learned about a few products that I wish I’d known about while at my previous job. These products would not only have saved me hours of work (itself a bonus), but they also would have fostered long-term collaboration.
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