18F Blog

Monolithic procurement — large, complex, multi-year contracts, which are common in government IT procurement — can appear compelling to agencies that use them. The Technology Transformation Services (TTS) is a strong advocate for an alternative approach known as modular contracting (aka modular procurement).

Working with 18F helped the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer create the largest collection of federal laboratory data and technology resources available online.

The U.S. Web Design Standards launched in September 2015 as a visual style guide and UI component library with the goal of bringing a common design language for government websites all under one hood. Learn how the team unified a complex system with numerous rules to serve users from all corners of the country.

At 18F, we have employees across the U.S. Over time, we’ve cultivated our best practices for distributed teams and design methods. Yet, doing research as a remote team is still really hard. Here are some things that we’ve found make it easier.

Often when developing open source software, and especially software that relies on outside services, you’ll find that you have to manage sensitive information. While there are a large number of things that can be considered sensitive, open source developers often deal with sensitive items such as API tokens, passwords, and private keys that are required for the system to function. Here's how we approached keeping this information safe.