18f Guides Mirror

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18f Guides Mirror


I was bummed to see that 18f got the axe as part of DOGE's cleanup of  "radical leftist" 
government waste (sarcasm). The loss of 18f is a shame because their mission was in fact 
related to efficiency and value - they were striving to operate in a way that yields 
reliable, usable software. Software that serves a purpose. In this case, making government
software more reliable and more accessible. 



This way of looking at software is critical today as more and more of our government services 
are delivered through some digital channel. We learned hard lessons about the state of software
development in the early days of the ACA. It was an actual mess, armies of expensive 
consultants built bloated systems that weren't reliable, weren't able to talk to each other, 
and ultimately didn't serve the people whose medical coverage was at stake. 

18f sought to reverse the trend in gov-tech by deploying small teams to work with modern tools 
and techniques to understand the users, their needs or jobs, and craft just enough software to 
get the job done. 

Were they successful? Kinda. They were able to apply their approach to a few high profile systems 
and ended up helping many people. 

One thing I really appreciated about the group was the way they captured their practice in a set of 
guides. These guides became the gold standard in some gov-tech circles. In fact during 
Lab Zero's 
entry into the ADPQ pool, the California Department of Technology required that all entries refer 
to the 18f playbooks and guides. You can see an example of how this works 
in Lab Zero's 
git repo where we captured an example of how 18f plays apply to the craft of software product 
development. 

There are some real basic common-sense concepts that show up here: 

 
understand your users and what they need
 
think about the entirety of your users experience
 
keep it simple
 
work, build, deliver incrementally, iteratively
 
have a leader on your team
 
use modern open source tools


But you know what? There are many places where these ideas are still exotic and rare. With some exceptions
gov-tech is still one of those places. 

So when it became clear that 18f was in the crosshairs of the DOGE-purges, I decided to grab 
the guides and make a private copy. 

Take a peek: https://greacen.com/media/guides/

Need a usability test script example to help get started with user testing? There's 
a guide for that. 
Need to lay some ground rules for how your engineers will handle incident responses? 
There's a 
guide for that. 

Is my hand-made scraper-script mirror/archive special? I thought it was for a bit, but then I came across 
18f's git repo (still not deleted!) and
saw that they've made it easy for you to grab it. Tip: grab it. 

Similarly, Lab Zero put a lot of energy into< creating resources that 
describe how we work. We use these to align with our clients or sometimes teach them something to help refine the way 
they work (want to know
more about Speclets? let's talk!). 

Teams that share skills and know-how for highly complex topics like delivering quality software products are 
worth paying attention to. So I pour one out for 18f.


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