18F Blog

The U.S. Digital Service is a collection of teams across the federal government, working to bring skilled technologists into public service. We are thrilled to be part of this effort, and will continue to lead the charge for making easy things easy and hard things possible.

Organizations like 18F and the U.K.’s Government Digital Service (GDS) fully embrace open source, and their combined commitment to openness and transparency is transforming the delivery of government digital services in both countries.

18F is dedicated to spreading modern software techniques like rigorous automated testing throughout the federal government; we want to showcase how solid testing enables rapid, high-quality development. When the product is based on a large relational database, this poses a dilemma: the full production dataset is too unwieldy to duplicate to the test and development environments.

Meetings are boring. Prototypes are cool. Use the meeting to build the prototype. We call building a prototype in three hours or less "protosketching."