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

dotconferences · talk · Watch on YouTube

Cloud, DevOps & reliabilitySoftware practice, open source & careers

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.

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.

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 2 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2014, last 2015

What HN commenters said

  1. “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”

    Engineers' account of fixing healthcare.gov

    brandonb, 2014-07 · Recommendation · in “Poorly Managed HealthCare.gov Construction Cost $840M, Watchdog Finds”

  2. “Worth watching”

    Explains how contractors owned pieces but nobody owned the website

    angersock, 2014-07 · Recommendation · in ““Agile” methodologies blamed for healthcare.gov failure”

  3. “You can watch a very entertaining talk from one of the Google engineers who went to fix the website at the time”

    Entertaining talk by a Google engineer who helped fix the site

    sylvinus, 2015-09 · Recommendation · in “How Healthcare.gov Botched $600M Worth of Contracts”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: healthcare.gov, site reliability, postmortem, government software, project management

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