dotScale 2014 - Robert Kennedy - Life in the Trenches of healthcare.gov
dotconferences3 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2014–2015
talk · intermediate · evergreen · 2014–2015 on HN
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.
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.
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5 comments from Hacker News
You can watch a very entertaining talk from one of the Google engineers who went to fix the website at the time: ▶ this video
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 If any of you out there want to help, please email jobs@hcgov.us!
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.
There was a talk at dotScale about the healthcare.gov website and what went bad on a technical level: ▶ this video
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