It is a common theme, that government of any kind, especially the US federal government is too slow when it comes to adopting new technology. While this may be a popular meme for anti-government crusaders, and is true in many areas of government, there are growing pockets of resistance across federal agencies, who are not just keeping up with the latest technology, but they are leading.
An example of this is out of the Department of Labor (DOL), with their new Swift Federal Data SDK, which provides a powerful SDK that allows you to work with multiple federal government data APIs, using the new Swift programming language. Swift is only a couple weeks old, and DOL didn't miss a beat in getting a new SDK published on Github for developers to take advantage of.
In my opinion, we can no longer use the tired old meme, that government is just too slow to adopt new technology. There are an increasing number of examples out there that prove otherwise. In the future when you want to criticize an agency for being to slow in their adoption of tech, don’t tell the same old tired story—point to examples like what DOL and 18F are up to, and incentivize the agencies to change in a positive way.
