Software Engineering

With Collaboration Comes Great Things

We are pleased to announce the beginnings of a new Syndication.Net/Sharepoint module for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Syndication Storefront. The collaborative effort between HHS and National Institutes of Health’s (NIH), National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) teams will eventually enable .NET content management system users to publish

Christen Geiler

Dec 21, 2015

The Data Briefing: Help #HackSuicide This Weekend

A month ago, I wrote about the White House’s call for data scientists and app developers to come together to help combat suicide. On December 12, 2015, there will be five hackathons around the U.S. to #HackSuicide. All the hackathons are free and open to the public. Even if you are not a data scientist,

Bill Brantley

Dec 09, 2015

The Data Briefing: How Neuroscience and Communication Theory Inform Good User Experience Design

Standing on the corner, waiting in the rain, I swear I’ll never, ever, use that app again. Why? Because the bad user experience (UX) design was preventing me from determining when the Metrobus would arrive. UX is everything from the visual design to the navigation structure of the website or mobile app. This month, DigitalGov

Bill Brantley

Nov 25, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: What Mobile Devices Do People Use to Access Federal Sites?

Mobile users of government websites are growing in double digit percentages and will likely soon become the majority. For some recent internal project research, I dove into some of the federal government-wide analytics looking at mobile usage and found a few interesting tidbits to share: It’s an OS battle of the As. Apple devices slightly

Will Sullivan

Nov 24, 2015

New Playbook Details What It’s Like to Work with 18F Delivery

If you or your agency have thought about working with 18F but are unsure of how we work with our partners, we have a new set of guidelines to help you out. The 18F Delivery Partner Playbook is specifically targeted at federal offices interested in working with 18F to build digital services. The playbook is

Will Slack

Nov 20, 2015

Is There a Generic Equivalent to My Brand Name Drug? Find out with FDA OB Express

The FDA has released a free native app for the public called Orange Book Express, or OB Express, as a mobile version of its Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations publication that is primarily used by pharmacists.

Nirmala Ramprasad

Nov 19, 2015

Post Office Whenever and Wherever—USPS Mobile® App

Technology has become integral to our lives, and now many of these familiar postal services are available at our fingertips on our mobile devices.

Nirmala Ramprasad

Nov 12, 2015

Open Source Micro-Purchasing: An Experiment in Federal Acquisition

18F is an open-source team. We currently have hundreds of publicly available repositories, with dozens under active development. We’ve had numerous contributions from colleagues within government, and contributions from members of the public. But in the next few weeks, we are going to run an experiment: we want to contract for contributions. And we want

Dave Zvenyach

Oct 16, 2015

Gov Analytics Breakdown #1 – Browsers: Chrome Takes the Cake

We wanted to take a look at overall browser usage now that DAP has a few years of data, and the changes tell an interesting story. Here’s a breakdown of the percent of total sessions of the top five browsers during the last three years.

Tim Lowden

Oct 15, 2015

The Data Briefing: Connecting the (Data) Dots—NASA’s NYSpaceTag App

OpenNASA has recently completed another redesign of their site. With over 31,000 data sets, 194 code repositories and 36 APIs, OpenNASA probably has the largest collection of open data of any of the federal agencies. An especially helpful feature is a set of icons devoted to five types

Bill Brantley

Sep 30, 2015

Under the Hood: Building a New College Scorecard with Students

How the U.S. Digital Service worked with students, families, schools, developers, and teams across the federal government to rebuild the new College Scorecard tool.

Lisa Gelobter

Sep 18, 2015

Rebuild Healthy Homes from HUD

We all know it is virtually impossible to prevent natural phenomena such as hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis etc., and we cannot easily avoid these inevitable geological and climatic incidences, as they are typically unpredictable and occur swiftly.

Nirmala Ramprasad

Aug 27, 2015

Three New Mobile Apps Honor Fallen Veterans Overseas

The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) released three new mobile apps this summer to honor fallen veterans in overseas cemeteries in Belgium, France, and Italy.

Aug 20, 2015

Communicart Tool Will Streamline Purchase Card Process

We’ve all been there. You walk into a meeting, set your things on the table, and sit down on the chair only to hit the floor instead. In a corporate office you might buy a new chair and get reimbursed, or maybe your company has a process for requesting new furniture. Regardless, that chair needs

Greg Boone

Aug 10, 2015

18F’s Style Guide for Open Source Project Documentation

We routinely publish our best practices in the 18F Guides, and today we’re happy to launch a new one: the 18F Open Source Style Guide. The Open Source Style Guide is a comprehensive handbook for writing clear, accessible, and user-friendly documentation so that

Melody Kramer

Aug 03, 2015

Explore Space with Smithsonian’s Chandra X-Ray App

We continue our celebration of American history and legacy this July 2015 with the New Horizons spacecraft’s dramatic flight past the icy dwarf planet Pluto and its moons—momentous in space exploration. Just think about it—New Horizons, a NASA space probe traveled over 3 billion miles to

Nirmala Ramprasad

Jul 23, 2015

An Introduction to HTTPS, by 18F and DigitalGov University

18F uses HTTPS for everything we make, and the U.S. government is in the process of transitioning to HTTPS everywhere. As part of this effort, we’ve recently partnered with DigitalGov University to produce a two-video series introducing the why’s and how’s of HTTPS. In an Introduction to HTTPS for beginners, we cover what happens when

Eric Mill

Gray Brooks

Jul 21, 2015

Safe Travels with TravWell

Ahhh … Summer is here at last! It’s time for relaxing vacation! Whether you want to scale the peaks of Mount Everest, scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef, ride a camel in the deserts of Mongolia, or shop in Paris—it is time for a travel app.

Nirmala Ramprasad

Jul 15, 2015

Help Us Strengthen Open Government

Since the United States joined the Open Government Partnership in 2011, U.S. agencies have been working alongside civil society to develop and implement commitments to increase transparency, improve participation, and curb corruption. From opening up Federal spending data to make it easier to see how taxpayer dollars are spent, to the We the People online

Corinna Zarek

Jul 10, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Native App Push Notifications Drive Repeat Use

Analytics company, Localytics, released a new report about mobile app retention rates from the past 4 years that agencies should heed when considering their needs for building native mobile apps, compared to mobile-friendly

Will Sullivan

Jun 30, 2015

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