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Comment by imjared | Hacker News Reader

The folks at Development Seed are doing really awesome work between Prose and MapBox and it's great to see them get some recognition for it.

Also a great plug for Jekyll in general. While there can certainly be more worrisome factors than cost for a site, site performance should be one of the most important issues when launching. By completely getting rid of a backing database, page lookup times can be reduced dramatically. As Prose continues to mature, it's getting more and more flexible by the day. Just last week they implemented an extensible "tagging" feature for posts: https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/464.

In case you haven't noticed, I'm a fan. Kudos to dev seed and big props to the White House team for the willingness to move away from Drupal.

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The folks at Development Seed are doing really awesome work

I am also a member of the Development Seed fan club, having met many of the team members. Though, I feel like they should update their PR statement. Every time they are mentioned in an article, the Drupal past comes out: The startup first made its mark in the DC tech scene consulting on Drupal I think we can all agree that mentioning one's history working with Drupal is not going to convey a feeling of cutting edge work by a, frankly, team of brilliant engineers like Dev Seed. I have done work with Drupal in the past, yet it does not appear on my resume.

Instead, they could be saying something like: Development Seed, makers of Mapbox and Tile Mill, which directly competes with Google Maps products, and in many ways is better, develops and promotes technologies and methodologies reminiscent of Bay Area start-ups.

These guys really do not get enough credit, even with a minor mention in the Atlantic article.

This was definitely more than a minor mention :)

Their history with Drupal is a key part of their value story in DC, where Drupal is cutting edge--it is rapidly replacing expensive proprietary CMS solutions for many federal agencies and nonprofits.

Although it might be hard to believe here on HN, saying something is "reminiscent of Bay Area start-ups" means jack squat to the folks in DC who spend a lot of money on web projects.

Agreed - this is great work and I'm really happy to see Government moving in this direction. Key point for Federal leadership here (in addition to the cost savings) are that a small team of developers and designers working together using open source tools can build great products that scale to meet the demands of government. Helps that the team seems very capable!

It's a risk for any CIO / CTO to kick off a project like this in government, and I applaud HHS for taking the step.

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