18F Blog

While there's no substitute for personal instruction and mentorship, that effort scales far more effectively when there are clear, concise materials to introduce the basics. 18F Guides aims to fill that role for our young and growing team, and we hope it may be of use to others as well.

On Friday, author and designer Dan Brown gave a talk at 18F. “Stop fighting, start designing,” centered around the design process and inherent conflict therein.

I recently spent time helping with one of our internal frustrations — how members of 18F track how we spend our time. Ultimately, we opted to try rolling our own simple solution using Django: Tock.

Dan Brown, co-founder of D.C.-based design firm EightShapes and author of Communicating Design and Designing Together, has spent years studying how and why conflict arises in the workplace, its centrality to good design, the differences between healthy and unhealthy conflict, and more. Dan will be speaking at 18F on Friday, May 22 at 1:30 PM.

If you’re a small-business owner, a veteran, or simply a person interested in tracking the status of your tax return, you’ve likely interacted with multiple government websites, which can require you to fill out a lot of forms and juggle a lot of information. Soon, you’ll be able to use MyUSA — a service that makes government resources easier to access, and government tasks and processes easier to keep track of.