Learning out Loud in Milwaukee, WI
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Riding the Great Washington Loop
This weekend I did a ride that’s been tempting me since we first moved from Arlington into the District three years ago: The Great Washington Loop. Starting from Georgetown, the loop takes you up the Capital Crescent Trail into Montgomery County and then circles the District via the Georgetown Branch Trail in Bethesda, Sligo Creek…
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Work from Wisconsin part two, St. Germain
For many people I knew growing up in Minnesota there was some notion of “up north.” For some people it was camp, others a friend’s or family’s cabin, and others yet it was a relative who lived “up north.” For me it was all of those at one point or another. Up north was a…
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Work from Wisconsin part one: Madison
One thing that’s really incredible about working for 18F is our ability to telework from just about anywhere. Everything we do is online and everyone we work with is in one of about six different places so even when we’re not teleworking, we’re teleworking. Being telework-able also means when we have to leave our home…
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2014 Capital Bikeshare Data
I stumbled upon a fascinating article on Chart-It this week about Capital Bikeshare’s 2014 data. Bikeshare makes its data available and Chart-It did a wonderful job of breaking down ridership and bike usage for the year 2014. Some highlights: Nearly 80% of rides are made by “registered members,” that is someone who is paying the monthly rate, not a tourist or “casual…
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GitHub for Mac: A Usability Review
Update: This post is out of date. The new GitHub Desktop App has major improvements to many of the usability problems addressed here. The GitHub For Mac app described below is no longer distributed. Since first learning how to use Git a couple years ago I’ve been pretty convinced that using the command line is…
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30DaysOfBiking: Five years later
Five years ago a small group of cyclists in Minneapolis got together a great idea: Ride a bike every day for the month of April. They called it 30 Days of Biking. I was in Korea at the time, riding my bike around the city of Ilsan, sometimes going as far as Paju near the…
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Be Proud of your Town
A friend from Gustavus was in town this week on a visit sponsored by his graduate program at the University of Minnesota and we had dinner a couple nights ago. I asked him how is week was going, hoping to hear that he had met a bunch of people like my friends: mission-driven people working for organizations that are…
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Why analytics.usa.gov Matters
Last weeek I had the pleasure of helping 18F launch analytics.usa.gov, a public dashboard showing basic data about how many people are visiting government websites at any given moment. While we got a lot of attention for it, being featured on Gizmodo, the Washington Post (twice), and a bunch of other tech and government industry press. More surprising to…
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The Supreme Joy of Writing in the Open
There are times when I’m spectacularly awed by Open Source Software. Today was one of those days. We published a blog post about how the team I work on uses the terminal, GitHub, and Jekyll to publish 18f.gsa.gov. This post could just as easily be titled “the guide I wish I had 10 years ago when I started tinkering…
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But Jekyll is not a CMS!
image from wikimedia commons Earlier this week I wrote another post comparing static site generators to content management systems using Jekyll and WordPress (perhaps unfairly) as representatives of their respective technologies. It got me thinking that in writing it I was compairing apples to oranges. Static site generators are not content management systems. They are generators, converting properly formatted…
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The Lasting Power of WYSIWYG
Jekyll has become one of my favorite things lately. At 18F we’re using it to power our website but also our Hub project which includes serving up snippets, our weekly team updates submitted by Google Form, as well as a tremendous amount of information that is a mix of pages restricted to our team and…