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Three ways to write fearless spreadsheet formulas
on November 5, 2024
Spreadsheets are the world's most popular programming environment — and the most feared. But what if spreadsheet formulas were easy to read and change without fear? Learn how a few simple principles can make your spreadsheets a joy to work with.
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Implementing rules without a rules engine
on October 9, 2018
If you’re building a rules-based system, don’t assume that you need a separate business rules engine product. Rules can be implemented more easily and with less overhead by cross-functional teams working to describe the rules and policy directly in code using a general purpose programming language like Python, Ruby, etc.
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Shared infrastructure as code
on August 15, 2018
At many government agencies, a central IT team manages DNS directly. Other teams must request changes using help desk tickets, which can have inconsistent turnaround times, and are susceptible to human error. Having DNS records as code and doing changes through pull requests brought turnaround time down from multiple days to under ten minutes.
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ETL: Extract, Transform, Learn
on August 9, 2018
Providing government data to the public almost always requires building a data processing pipeline between its place of origin and the systems that will serve it. Data must be copied, transferred between digital storage formats, reshaped to meet the needs of reporting systems, groomed for readability, and cleansed for accuracy.
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Moving a legacy Microsoft environment to the Azure cloud
on February 1, 2018
Securely connecting Azure with an on-premises server environment provides the benefits of a modern, cloud infrastructure, while making it trivial for application developers to interface with an on-premises legacy environment.
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Automated scanning for sensitive information in the development lifecycle
on September 26, 2017
Often when developing open source software, and especially software that relies on outside services, you’ll find that you have to manage sensitive information. While there are a large number of things that can be considered sensitive, open source developers often deal with sensitive items such as API tokens, passwords, and private keys that are required for the system to function. Here's how we approached keeping this information safe.
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What is static source analysis?
on October 4, 2016
Static source analysis is a way to quickly gauge the quality of source code and identify areas of high technical debt. But what IS static source analysis, and how is it useful?
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DATA Act prototype: Simplicity is key
on August 29, 2016
To ensure that agencies could focus on the important work of joining their internal systems without unnecessary technology distractions, we (the 18F and Treasury prototype team) sought to deliver the simplest possible interface that would accept agency data using the simplest possible format for that data.
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Micro-purchase’s design philosophy: Do one thing well
on August 25, 2016
Rather than wait for knowledge to naturally diffuse through team changes, we try to kick-start the process through shared interest groups, tech talks, and documents highlighting some of the more interesting design decisions our developers make. Today, we'll focus on some of the core architectural philosophiesbehind the Micro-purchase project.
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How we get high availability with Elasticsearch and Ruby on Rails
on April 8, 2016
If you’re already using Ruby on Rails and Elasticsearch, check out our replacement Rake tasks for the Elasticsearch Rails gem.
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