Through the Coding it Forward fellowship, I worked as a front-end engineer with the General Services Administration. I interned with the Digital.gov team to improve government communities deliver better digital services to the American public.

Over seven weeks, I researched, prototyped, and delivered a community-oriented job board to increase exposure to technology-related job openings in the federal government. In the process, I learned software engineering practices in civic technology, worked alongside talented human beings, and delivered a public product that can be seen on the Digital.gov website.

The final product can be found on the Digital.gov website.

Presentation slides (with more visuals) on my job board project can be found here.

Digital.gov hosts 8 Communities of Practice, which are large mailing lists that allow federal employees to collaborate and share resources regarding digital experiences across the government.

The email list structure offers no filter for conversation, oftentimes cluttering people’s inboxes

Finding job openings in the federal government is also difficult. USAJOBS, the primary federal job platform, does a poor job aggregating positions based on keywords. Government job descriptions are also vague, requiring users to read each position thoroughly to understand the true nature of the position title. Agencies and sub-agencies have created job boards to filter USAJOBS postings.

The Digital.gov team sought to reduce email clutter in Communities of Practice email lists, while also creating a product that benefits job seekers

I investigated each Community of Practice to better understand the current frustrations around email clutter. I also talked to content managers on the Digital.gov team to understand their current workflow managing the website, as well as their relationship with each Community.

I discovered a strong set of frequent users across each Community of Practice, but recognized that not all email list members are looking for job openings, and may see emails regarding job openings as “spam”. This led me to consider developing a public job board, rather than one restricted to the Communities of Practice.

I also learned how time-consuming some processes took for content managers, such as responding to customer tickets and managing the mailing lists on outdated technologies. 

I kept my users in mind as I developed the technical requirements of the job board

The job board needed a method to submit job postings, a database to manage these postings, and a public page that hosts the job board

I went through about 4-5 iterations of the job board, experimenting with available technologies on the Digital.gov tech stack. 

My largest barrier was calling an authorized API on the USAJOBS website, where each federal job opening was publicly hosted. No matter how I called the API to gather information for each job, I kept on revealing my API key’s authorization information, posing security risks. This was a unique issue to Digital.gov, because the website is built on a lightweight, static site generator.

After a few failed attempts, I zoomed out and reconsidered my user needs. I recalled that no matter the implementation of the job board, that content managers on Digital.gov would have to have a hand in adding/removing jobs on the board. I recognized an opportunity to use this management privilege in the implementation of the job board.

Leveraging Hugo, Typescript, Google sheets and scripting, REST API calls, and GitHub, I built a “backend” management system that allows content managers to add and remove job postings on the public-facing job board.

The API calls are private, and the content managers can publish a formatted file that automatically converts into the public-facing job board.

I automated several components of the job board management process, reducing the time and brainpower needed to manage the platform. On the public-facing job board, each position is tagged with affiliated Community of Practices for improved navigation.

The job board aims to decrease email clutter in Communities of Practice email lists by 25%, increase Communities of Practice member retention rates, and increase usage of the Digital.gov website.

I was honored to present my project to the Coding it Forward fellowship and larger community, as well as the Technology Transformation Services department in the GSA. You can find my presentation slides here.

I am grateful to the Digital.gov team for allowing me to learn and grow through this internship!