Move over FedEx, FCC now offers next-day delivery.
DevEx Day, a new initiative at the Federal Communications Commission, aims to expedite innovation and inspire creativity among agency developers. The name is a play off FedEx and “developer day” with an emphasis on getting a minimum viable product shipped within a 24-hour time period.
The idea is to get developers together for one day, free from email, phone and meetings, to encourage an agile approach to development. The day begins with participants presenting ideas, followed by 24 hours of collaborative coding, and ending with presentations and feedback. Projects are then pushed to GitHub for others to collaborate on, some of which will be available as future repositories through FCC’s official account. One byproduct of DevEx is esri2open, which exports ESRI Feature Classes to open data formats, CSV, JSON and GeoJSON.
“DevEx Day not only motivates our team, but provides continuous learning and growth that makes us a more nimble agency, moving away from monolithic system architectures to portable, changeable, flexible products largely based on open source tools,” said FCC Geographic Information Officer Michael Byrne and Deputy GIO Eric Spry. “This not only makes us capable of utilizing cutting-edge development, but allows us to contribute to the larger community of open government.”
