Ben Balter

Here is my list of solo developer blogs. Usually they are on topic. This does not include personal blogs I follow that happen to be developers. @mdo (Bootstrop) - http://markdotto.com/ Keith Cirkel - https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/ Coding – Corbin's Treehouse - https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog Aaditya Purani – Ethical Hacker - https://aadityapurani.com/ Ben Balter - http://ben.balter.com/ fulldecent - https://privacylog.blogspot.com Orange - http://blog.orange.tw/ Cocoa with Love - http://www.cocoawithlove.com/ Mark Otto - http://markdotto.com/ Moxie Marlinspike's Blog - http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/ hueniverse - http://hueniverse.com/

18F is part of the General Services Administration and was ostensibly tasked to not just work on IT (for GSA, and others) but to develop and promulgate best practices across the federal agencies. A 2015 blog post about "The difference between 18F and USDS": https://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/ > The [Presidential Innovation Fellows] program was a success, and soon after a group called 18F was created within the General Services Administration (GSA) not only to house the PIFs, both physically and bureaucratically, but also to continue and augment their efforts — to centralize forward-thinking technologists in government under one administrative umbrella, and to provide a vehicle for change that wasn’t tied so closely to the administration and the highly political world in which it operates on a daily basis

I'm guessing it's in Word format because most procurement departments use (and expect a Word document) for terms. But I very much agree, that it'd be great to have it on GitHub for collaboration. I'd even suggest this tool (http://ben.balter.com/2015/02/06/word-diff/) my colleague (@benbalter) made to collaborate on Word docs using GitHub.

If anyone is interested, the FCC has a fairly comprehensive list of Developers pages for other federal agencies: http://www.fcc.gov/developers (on the right column). Also, for further reading on the topic of .gov APIs, http://ben.balter.com/2012/06/02/publishing-government-data-that-devel… is a great start.

In this vein, if you want this kind of functionality, the following might be worth checking out--a plug-in for WordPress that turns it into a version-control system for any type of file: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-document-revisions/ "WP Document Revisions is a document management and version control plugin. Built for time-sensitive and mission-critical projects, teams can collaboratively edit files of any format -- text documents, spreadsheets, images, sheet music... anything -- all the while, seamlessly tracking the document's progress as it moves through your organization's existing workflow." More info (incl. screencast): http://ben.balter.com/2011/08/29/wp-document-revisions-document-manage…

I found this: https://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/ From this description, it seems they're different approaches to the same problem of "fixing US govt IT projects", with USDS being more of a reactive group with power to act on behalf of the White House and therefore bypass agency structures. I would be very interested in hearing from the fellow from USDS as well though.

https://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/ "Unlike 18F, which is approached by agencies asking for help, USDS has a shortlist of administration priorities that it actively pursues."

The Mozilla Public License is not a standard licence. If you don't understand why it's unhelpful to muddy the waters with non-standard licences, here's a blog post: https://ben.balter.com/2016/08/01/why-you-shouldnt-write-your-own-open…

Here's a write-up on the differences (and similarities) that I've found: http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/.

18F is also based on GDS. 18f.gov Explanation of the difference between USDS and 18F: http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/

They work just like any other Markdown file, and you can include a link in the rendered site to edit. See http://ben.balter.com/2015/09/13/github-pages-edit-button/.

Seems like it's mostly a philosophical difference. Two directions to the same goal. http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/

Also check out 18F [1], which focuses on pushing forward how tech and the government work together. They run a 12-month Presidential Innovation Fellows program [2] which works more intensely on innovating with specific groups within the federal government. USDS is more focused on modernizing and ensuring some basic technical functionality of a lot of the core aspects of the government (which is incredibly important and impactful, but is less about innovation -- see a comparison here [3]). [1] https://18f.gsa.gov/ [2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows [3] http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/

If anyone reading this is looking for a more permanent job working for the government, check out https://18f.gsa.gov/ which is trying to build up a modern software group which provides services for the rest of the government. Ben Balter, Github's Government evangelist, summarized the difference between the two here: http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/ (Disclaimer: I don't work there but know a number of people who do and, as a taxpayer, am cheering them on)

Actually, he works on some seemingly cool stuff at Github, (http://ben.balter.com/about/) and I think #9 is a complaint about being unable to monitor code in production, which is a valid concern even if your test suite is well written and someone else is performing the actual deployment IMO.

HTTPS can also be used to protect you from malware [1] [2] and stop censorship [3]. If anything, news sites should be among the first to adopt strong HTTPS connections since many people visit them and the news also needs to not be censored. [1] https://citizenlab.org/2014/08/cat-video-and-the-death-of-clear-text/ [2] http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2014/AP-Seattle-Times-Upset-A… [3] http://ben.balter.com/2015/01/06/https-all-the-things/ As for the performance side, SPDY is probably not perfect, but it seems to generally improve over current HTTP, even if it uses secure connection. But even if it didn't, using HTTPS seems to add negligible overhead, and compared to the security it gives I think it's well worth it. https://www.httpvshttps.com/

> Even if through some process the license changes in the future, your contributions were still to an open source license and that version of the code will remain open forever. Well, that's a good take. You're right of course: the exact version of the codebase you contributed to, was licensed as OSS and it will always stay like that. So yes, copyleft is more about providing guarantees about the future, while non-copyleft can only provide guarantees about the present. I think this way of putting it is clearer than my previous way of saying it. Thanks for bringing up this point of view. > This is the reason why projects like MAME have contributor agreements now. Hence articles such as [1] and [2], which have been posted in HN before, albeit with pretty much zero conversation. Still, just like I'm interested in the topic of OSS licenses and the thought process of people who choose them for their projects, I find also interesting the matter about CLAs and whether to go on with one or instead opting to use a DCO [3], which some well known OSS projects have preferred in the past: [4], [5]. [1]: Why CLAs aren't good for open source -- https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems [2]: Why you probably shouldn’t add a CLA to your open source project -- https://ben.balter.com/2018/01/02/why-you-probably-shouldnt-add-a-cla-… [3]: CLA vs. DCO: What's the difference? -- https://opensource.com/article/18/3/cla-vs-dco-whats-difference [4]: (GitLab)…