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Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

thedoctorweighsin.com

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#31
post #2

$293M.... I'm just consistently angry over how much this cost. There are so many moving pieces, and while I understand that, $293M for one piece. Half a billion for a website. Christ.

If you hire 10 web developers fulltime for 2 years, it would come down to ~$7000 hourly rate per developer.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#32
post #19

At least they didn't use windows/.net stack this time.

Amen to that. This thread and all others that mention the healthcare.gov debacle would go on forever talking about MS and ignoring the fundamental issues of bad architecture and government waste.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#33
post #4

"I can tell that this system consists of a JBoss Application Server with data access components and RESTful web services developed using Java. Given my prior experience with JBoss and Java, although they are great for middleware development, they’re known to be a bit slow." I always had this non founded impression that something running on the JVM would be slow ... this author also. Anyone with data to back this impr…

It has nothing to do with "running on the JVM". The JVM is about as fast as you'll get any VM offering GC and running an IR like Java bytecode. It's only slow compared to compiled, native code (and even then nowhere near as relatively slow as it used to be), which no competing tech stack would be doing. It's much faster than Ruby, Python, etc. That said, my experiences with JBoss haven't left me enamoured of it, and…

In techempower's web framework benchmarks[1], Java-base frameworks top most categories. One C++-based framework, CPoll, gets a few percentage points more in a few tests, but Java servlets are the highest performing across all tests. (As always with micro-benchmarks, take all this with a grain of salt, but at least it's some data.)

1 - http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#34
post #2

$293M.... I'm just consistently angry over how much this cost. There are so many moving pieces, and while I understand that, $293M for one piece. Half a billion for a website. Christ.

Sorry, but you obviously have no idea what you are talking about when you call it, "a website"

Or is google just a website? Is yahoo.com just a website? Did you look at the infograph?

How much do you think it will take to talk to 5 agencies and 300 insurance providers that have 4500+ health plans, and get them to agree/adhere, understand their EXISTING system and build a site?

I'm not justifying the expense, but let's not trivialize the task at hand and call it just a website.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#35
post #19

At least they didn't use windows/.net stack this time.

stackoverflow and plentyoffish are windows stack. I just found out and read about this a few days ago, I'm very impressed. So I won't shake my fist at windows stack. With competent developers, windows/c#/MSQL, etc can holds it's on too. it's been demonstrated.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#36
post #28
post #19

At least they didn't use windows/.net stack this time.

What makes you say that? Having built systems in this space with very large number of users using the .net platform, I wonder why you stated this. I am a supporter of open and non-MS software but I don't think we can blame it on the technology this time. In my experience so far a well engineered system, will perform regardless of the technology stack picked. Picking technology X or Y will not compensate for bad archi…

Couldn’t agree with you more.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#37
The problem isnt the part that you can see, the Front-End. The problem is the legacy systems on the Back-End that need to talk to each other. And if one of these requests time out, the whole request fails, doesnt matter if the 5 systems before responded it has to go through the process again.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#38

People appear to be missing the point that _the website_ is literally the smallest part of the project. While it's easy for people to crap on things like js-minifying, cache control, etc - the hard reality is the stuff that is the hardest is so hard that most people have never done anything even remotely close. Having worked on 10m+ loc codebases, life gets very hard. Dynamic languages tend to be unworkable. Module c…

If only there was a way to remove the hundreds of private insurance companies they have to interface with. I assume they each have their own flavor of EDI, greatly adding to the complexity of this thing. (I have had to write interop EDI stuff with some insurance companies a while back and iirc they were snowflakes)

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#39

People appear to be missing the point that _the website_ is literally the smallest part of the project. While it's easy for people to crap on things like js-minifying, cache control, etc - the hard reality is the stuff that is the hardest is so hard that most people have never done anything even remotely close. Having worked on 10m+ loc codebases, life gets very hard. Dynamic languages tend to be unworkable. Module c…

Given the complexity of the system, the most shocking thing to me is that how little time they had to actually build it. And from what's been made public there was virtually no time for testing (load testing was certainly absent). It should been "turned on" months before the public go-live to iron out all of these issues.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#40

People appear to be missing the point that _the website_ is literally the smallest part of the project. While it's easy for people to crap on things like js-minifying, cache control, etc - the hard reality is the stuff that is the hardest is so hard that most people have never done anything even remotely close. Having worked on 10m+ loc codebases, life gets very hard. Dynamic languages tend to be unworkable. Module c…

> I invite you to research EDI and then report back here. Assuming you're still alive.

Which EDI standar ... ohhh I see what you're getting at.

When you look at it like a single point aggregating all this information from all these separate insurance companies, it's amazing it works at all.

When you look at the website failing the way it is though, you can't help but ask 'did they even test this thing' even when you know better.

When you look at it from a user point of view, it's too bad it appears to not work at all.

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