Nothing but love to Adam and the Tailwind team (including now-former team members) today. They’ve made huge contributions to web development and it just sucks, sucks, sucks that things have turned out this way. I know he’ll find a way forward, though.
18F [1] was the government’s design group, and did incredible work to improve the level of visual, UX, and UI design as well as usability across federal government websites. They created standards, led trainings and workshops, and were a go-to resource for people in and outside of the government.
You may have heard about the US Digital Service, but 18F were equally rockstar-level in the local community. Highly dedicated civil servants who were very good at what they did and very good at communicating it to others.
In May, DOGE unceremoniously gutted the department and shut it down.
Thankfully, they’ve archived their guides on an external site [2]. I didn’t even work for the federal government but I used to use these all the time when I was a product manager.
If you happen to see a resume come across your desk from someone who worked at 18F, jump on that. You’re lucky.
DOGE is/was on a mission regardless of their awareness of it. The mission is much larger than a single department or the patsy who was running it.
In other words, the murdering of sanity in government has just began, many will suffer, none of the people who supported this lunacy will escape the suffering, but of course, telling them that is a complete waste of time.
Co-Founder of Geocodio here — glad we were able to help with your geocoding+timezone needs!
(And glad to hear that conference sponsorships work. A lot of smaller conferences are struggling to find sponsors these days, so if anyone reading is in a position to sponsor, the organizer of your favorite conference would probably appreciate it!)
You're welcome. Thanks for the sponsorships! They DO work, but I imagine sometimes hard to quantify. I know I've been able to recommend geocodio first hand to folks in my user groups who a) hadn't heard of it and b) wouldn't have been able to attend conferences.
FWIW, first time I saw you was at LonghornPHP in Austin. 2021, IIRC.
The organizer of Longhorn PHP is a friend of ours (Daniel Abernathy), and we have a somewhat official-unofficial rule that we always sponsor our friends' conferences :)
Thanks for being a sponsor at PHP[Tek] this year. Your stickers are out on a table next to our booth and I've been periodically telling people what you guys do as they walk by.
We’re not selling anything about AI and have no association with Claude Code, though