18f Guides Mirror

By: Chris Greacen - 03/27/2025
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.