I want to relate a great little thing that happened here at 18th and F yesterday.

At 11am yesterday morning, members of the GSA.gov team, Sarah Hyder and Patrick Son, met with Hillary Hartley, Alison Rowland, and me to talk about how to integrate FBOpen into GSA’s mobile website, m.gsa.gov, on its How To Sell to the Government” page.

At 11:29am, we had working code up and running on their staging server.

We get so used to things taking multiple meetings, multiple days/weeks/months, and lots of back and forth. A couple stars aligned to make this one easy, but bottom line: it took 29 minutes to go from “How could we do this?” to a working code integration that went live the same afternoon.

I thought you should hear about what can happen when you get two simple, clean GSA codebases in a room together. This is what gets me excited about working at 18F every day!

Kudos especially to Sarah, Patrick and their team. In m.gsa.gov they’ve built something on a nice, flexible, modern architecture that’s amenable to the same rapid prototyping and iteration that 18F is all about.