dotScale 2014 - Robert Kennedy - Life in the Trenches of healthcare.gov

You can watch a very entertaining talk from one of the Google engineers who went to fix the website at the time: ▶ this video

There was a talk at dotScale about the healthcare.gov website and what went bad on a technical level: ▶ this video

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.

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!

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