The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) is a library of design and code guidelines to help agencies create trustworthy, accessible, and consistent digital services. The Design System is being used on over one hundred government sites, with an audience of 120 million users. In this 12th post in our series, we sat down with Jason Garber, front-end web developer at the U.S. Digital Service (USDS)‘s Defense Digital Service, to talk about his work creating a Ruby gem for the new Move.mil that integrates the Design System into a Ruby on Rails application.

I was recently interviewed by the team behind the U.S. Web Design System about the uswds-rails Ruby gem I put together. Yay, open source!

Middleman is a static site generator using all the shortcuts and tools in modern web development.

Jammit is an industrial strength asset packaging library for Rails, providing both the CSS and JavaScript concatenation and compression that you’d expect, as well as YUI Compressor and Closure Compiler compatibility, ahead-of-time gzipping, built-in JavaScript template support, and optional Data-URI / MHTML image embedding.

In this post I’m going to show you how I created the little Flickr stream you can see running down the right hand edge of this site.