18F Blog

Conventional wisdom often encourages engineers to start with a big architectural overview, but this kind of a grand plan usually leads to technical-debt. Instead of using an architecture-first plan, you should focus on user experience design and software design to help your project avoid technical debt.

Four weeks ago, we announced cloud.gov, a new platform that will enable small federal teams to rapidly develop and deploy web services with best-practice, production-level security and scalability. Currently, we’re running a small pilot program to prepare to open up cloud.gov to all federal agencies. In the meantime, we’d like to lay out some more details about the project and answer some common questions.

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.

Last month, content strategist and UX designer Natalie Kurz from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau presented at 18F. Prior to her presentation, we had the chance to chat with Kurz via email about her experience working with different types of content, her predictions for the field, and the collaborative approaches she recommends.

Well, we sure didn’t expect this. But the winning bid for the first iteration of the 18F micro-purchase experiment was $1. And on Wednesday, the winner delivered a solution that passed our acceptance criteria.