Blog posts by Chris Cairns:

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of the Treasury are the first two agencies to participate in the Digital Acquisition Accelerator Pilot.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working on ways to contract with high-quality digital service vendors, which is why they just released a Request for Information (RFI) for creating an Environmental Digital Services marketplace.

In the final part of our series on technical debt, we talk about ways to minimize accumulating bad or unnecessary technical debt in the first place.

We’ve come to realize that there may be opportunities to achieve high impact in targeted areas by aligning our subject expertise with our digital expertise. To test our hypothesis, we’re launching an alpha version of our first policy vertical (or niche market) within 18F Consulting: the Digital Economy Practice.

In the last post in this series, we talked about the potential consequences of having a lot of technical debt. Now, we’ll give you concrete steps to identify and then manage that technical debt so it doesn’t get out of hand.

In part two of our series on technical debt, we define what technical debt is and how it can negatively impact your organization or project.

Technical debt is a financial metaphor that software developers use to talk to managers about the “hidden” costs associated with a system’s architecture and codebase. Over a series of upcoming posts, we’re going to explain what technical debt is, how to manage it, and some ways to prevent accumulating it.

18F has been working on reducing the costs of entry to the cloud and thinking about good practices for cloud migration. One good practice is to adopt a scaled approach to cloud migration to avoid cloudfall.

The Request for Quotation (RFQ) for the Agile Delivery Services Blanket Purchase Agreement (Agile Delivery BPA) is hitting the street on Wednesday, June 17, 2015.

A poorly written RFP will expose you to such risks as overbidding to compensate for uncertainty, vendor lock-in, and catastrophic failure due to miscommunication and misunderstanding. You don’t want that. The taxpaying public doesn’t want that. And neither does 18F.

18F and GSA’s Office of Integrated Technology Services (ITS) held a pair of events for our upcoming Agile Delivery Services blanket purchase agreement (BPA). Over 700 people registered for the events, showing just how much interest there is from the private sector in this new BPA.

We recently kicked off a new project with the Department of the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR). Three weeks into the project, we decided to hold a design studio to solve the problem of how to convey complex revenue data. We needed to better understand the difference between onshore revenue (revenue from natural resources extracted from land) and offshore revenue (revenue from resources extracted from Federal offshore or the U.S. outer continental shelf) as it relates to our system. What is a design studio, you ask...