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

dotconferences · 12.8K views · 2014-07-17 · 27:21

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Overview

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.

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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.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2014–2015

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What people said

sylvinus · 2015-09 · Recommendation

You can watch a very entertaining talk from one of the Google engineers who went to fix the website at the time: [VIDEO]

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brandonb · 2014-07 · Recommendation

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] [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!

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angersock · 2014-07 · Recommendation

Worth watching: [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.

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Sources

Video by dotconferences, played through YouTube.

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