Blog

June 24, 2016

5 lessons in object-oriented design from Sandi Metz

By Jessie Young

Last month, I completed Sandi Metz's object-oriented design course. It was three intense days of working through refactoring exercises and discussing code as a group with my class of 30 students. I got a ton out of the class and returned to my work at 18F excited to practice what I'd learned. I've rounded up my top lessons from the course for you to enjoy.

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best practices

June 21, 2016

Using plain language to bridge the gap between government and industry

By Ryan Sibley

Recently, we partnered with the Office of Integrated Technology Services (ITS) here within the General Services Administration (GSA) on a four-month effort to develop a plain language guide, informed by research and interviews, to help technology companies interested in doing business with the federal government better understand how to join IT Schedule 70.

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content design general services administration procurement agency work

June 20, 2016

Build empathy with stakeholder interviews, part 1: Preparation

By Andrew Maier

In this post, I'll cover what stakeholder interviews are, why they’re valuable, and how to prepare for them. In the second post, I’ll cover how to actually run the interviews as well as some tips for synthesizing and integrating the results into the team’s shared understanding.

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user research user-centered design how we work

June 17, 2016

Exciting additions to analytics.usa.gov

By Tim Lowden

We’ve expanded analytics.usa.gov to include 15(!) more agency-specific dashboard pages. We now offer agency-specific analytics data pages for a total of 25 major federal agencies, and each one is accessible from the dropdown menu at the top of the site.

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analytics.usa.gov

June 16, 2016

Emanuel Feld talks about his visualization of government GitHub organizations

By Melody Kramer

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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open source open government