I finished my Presidential Innovation Fellowship six months ago, and I feel like it’s taken that long to process the journey. For those of you who are considering government service, considering the Innovation Fellowship specifically, or merely curious, I offer these reflections on my year as a PIF.
Writing
On occasion, I write about technology, civic tech, and design here.
Vintage posts are in the archive.
Uncle Sam Wants YOU...to be a Hero Hacker
Round Three of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program is now accepting applications from creative, energetic policy hackers, entrepreneurs, user experience experts, designers, frontend developers, backend developers, system architecture wizards, data wranglers, and more to serve their tours of duty to radically improve the delivery of government digital services.
Why should you (yes, YOU) take time out of your busy schedule to apply (deadline: April 7)? Three important reasons:
Drag-and-drop In-Browser Dev Tools Review
Wouldn’t it be great if we designers/developers could just move bits of website around visually and get beautiful, well-structured code to work with out the other end? The stuff of dreams! If this is your dream, then this might be your year! In service of The Future, I tested (or attempted to test) four of the current front-runners: Webflow, Divshot, Froont, and Jetstrap. Read on for a summary and full reviews.
You can also read my writing in other places, such as:
The 18F blog
- 18F’s best practices for making distributed teams work
- User-centered design at 18F: a design studio for natural resource revenues
- See all my 18F blog posts
Process documentation
- Little rules for designing with data, presented at
csvconf 2017 - 18F Lean Product Design Guide (with Nick Brethauer and Colin MacArthur)
- The standard retro method and doc used across 18F
- Using a GitHub wiki to put user research and project documentation together with code