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

dotScale 2014 - Robert Kennedy - Life in the Trenches of healthcare.gov on HackerTube: recommended by 3 Hacker News commenters across 2 separate months, 2014–2015.

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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.

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.

people recommended it
3
separate months
2
strong recommendations
0
discussed on HN
2014–2015
“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”
— brandonb, Jul 2014, in “Poorly Managed HealthCare.gov Construction Cost $840M, Watchdog Finds”

What HN commenters said

5 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

sylvinusSep 2015Recommends

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

in “How Healthcare.gov Botched $600M Worth of Contracts” · View on HN

brandonbJul 2014Recommends

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 [email protected]!

in “Poorly Managed HealthCare.gov Construction Cost $840M, Watchdog Finds” · View on HN

angersockJul 2014Recommends

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.

in ““Agile” methodologies blamed for healthcare.gov failure” · View on HN

sylvinusAug 2014Cites it

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

in “White House launches “U.S. Digital Service,” with HealthCare.gov fixer at helm” · View on HN

sylvinusJul 2014Cites it

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

in “The first Swift conference worldwide (Feb 6th, Paris)” · View on HN

Topics & tags

Cloud, DevOps & reliabilitySoftware practice, open source & careershealthcare.govsite reliabilitypostmortemgovernment softwareproject management