dotScale 2014 - Robert Kennedy - Life in the Trenches of healthcare.gov
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an entertaining first-hand engineer account of what went wrong with healthcare.gov and how it was fixed, including that no one owned the whole site.
What it is
A dotScale 2014 talk by Robert Kennedy, a former healthcare.gov SRE who later worked at Google, about the engineering effort to rescue the troubled site. It explains the technical and organizational problems behind the failed launch.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2014 to 2015.
What Hacker News said
Recommends brandonb · 2014-07 · on “Poorly Managed HealthCare.gov Construction Cost $840M, Watchdog Finds”
I was part of the "tech surge" brought in to help patch up healthcare.gov in December. The GAO report gives a decent idea of what went wrong in 2010-2013 from a high-level contracting and policy perspective, but it doesn't really give much technical detail or describe what was broken about the organization, software architecture, and culture. A couple of my colleagues have given talks on healthcare.gov from the perspective of the engineers who worked around the clock to help get the site running again: [LINK] [this video] A small team is also re-writing the site, starting with the most troublesome components for the next open enrollment period. Wired covered some of what is going on here: [LINK]
Recommends angersock · 2014-07 · on ““Agile” methodologies blamed for healthcare.gov failure”
Worth watching: [this video] I like the way the presenter sums it up...it seems like each contractor was responsible for their own little piece of the stack, and nobody was actually responsible for delivering a website . That should've been the gating criteria.
Recommends sylvinus · 2015-09 · on “How Healthcare.gov Botched $600M Worth of Contracts”
You can watch a very entertaining talk from one of the Google engineers who went to fix the website at the time: [this video]
Cites sylvinus · 2014-07 · on “The first Swift conference worldwide (Feb 6th, Paris)”
I think it has to do mostly with the image they want to have in the developer community. Plus, watching a HD video shot in a Theater like ours is arguably more enjoyable and impactful than something shot in a studio. You can check this as an example: [this video]
Cites sylvinus · 2014-08 · on “White House launches “U.S. Digital Service,” with HealthCare.gov fixer at helm”
There was a talk at dotScale about the healthcare.gov website and what went bad on a technical level: [this video]