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Articles by Alan deLevie
How and why we built the micro-purchase bidding platform
This past December, 18F launched a micro-purchase platform to enable vendors to place bids on opportunities to deliver open source code that costs $3,500 or less. This platform is a key part of 18F’s larger experiment around using the federal government’s micro-purchase authority to procure useful digital services from the broader vendor community. Below is a look at how and why we built this platform. For the first micro-purchase auction, we launched a minimum viable product (MVP).
How to Protosketch
This post is a follow-on to the 18F blog post: "Sketching with Code: Protosketching", which concludes: Although not difficult, protosketching demands a definite "bag of tricks" that one should understand to rapidly create web-enabled spike solutions. Let's dive a little deeper in. Your basic goal is to demonstrate possibilities rapidly.
Sketching with Code: Protosketching
Giving Program Managers the Freedom to Sleep at Night build the prototype. We call building a prototype in three hours or less protosketching. Developers and designers working in bureaucratic organizations can astonish their colleagues by building clickable prototypes in a one-to-three hour meeting. Designers often sketch on paper and developers often prototype with code. We argue that you should sometimes sketch in code — protosketching. Being able to do this within a meeting sparks the imagination.
Hot off the press: 18F's API Standards
We recently released the first version of our API Standards — a set of recommendations and guidelines for API production. It is our intention that every 18F API meet these standards, to help us ensure a baseline quality and consistency across all APIs we offer now and in the future. These standards guide the user-facing implementation details of an API. Wherever possible, the standards prescribe a goal instead of a specific technology.
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