Mailbag

Two great comments under yesterday’s post asking, “Who Broke Healthcare.gov?” The first one comes from longtime VP reader, Mr. Lion:

The last major network and application rollout I did cost the company I did it for about 100k. It took me, working alone, about three months to roll out. It routinely handled millions of fairly expensive (CPU wise) transactions, not just hits, per day. It was a mission critical setup, the outage of which would have cost the company millions in advertising revenue per day.

Never had a single issue.

That’s what happens when a competent manager hires a competent consultant. E.g. the exact polar opposite of everything government.

It’s interesting to note that not all that long ago, when we were cranking out a few hundred airplanes per day to go blow up Europe, that’s exactly how the War Dept. worked.

Peacetime military procurement always takes too long and costs too much. Describing peacetime civilian procurement requires swear words so vile they haven’t been invented yet. Which brings us to Greg Hill:

Holy. Sh*t.

I just downloaded the javascript file you’re pointing to. It’s over 500k in size! And that’s just one file. Apparently there are dozens. They’re being downloaded separately, rather than in one, compressed file.

And I can’t even begin to figure out what the f*ck they’re trying to accomplish. There doesn’t appear to be any AJAX employed to streamline the initial download and push some of the optional data to a background thread. (yes, that would increase the number of calls to the server, but it also reduces the size of the initial download, and prevents downloading data that is not necessary for a particular customer)

And here’s something even more interesting, in a “look at the train wreck mommy!” kinda way–the url protocol is https. That’s supposed to be secure. If they had their sh*t together, we shouldn’t be able to see *anything* at https://www.healthcare.gov/ (except for a login page) without logging in first. Now that’s not, obviously, something that is deal breaker for functionality. And if the rest of the site were actually, you know, WORKING, I’d shrug it off as a “fix it with rev2.” But the fact that it’s open is definitely not a “good” practice.

Jeebus. This just gets worse and worse.

I’d say “unbelievable.” But that’s just not the case anymore, is it?

The promises we’re hearing from ObamaCare apologists is that every major website rollout sucks, and that they’ll get the kinks ironed out in a few weeks, or at worst in a couple months. But if Messrs Lion and Hill are correct, we’re looking at an untangle-able clusterfudge of truly federal proportions.

Can anyone else in IT please take a look and help enlighten us?