It is pretty funny to be able to dial an extension from your desk phone to get the IVR of paultag's Christmas tree, but man does managing asterisk suck.
I'm one of the people whose home LAN is completely exposed to TPL. There's an amount of "screwing around" where I wouldn't care. If you want to print an xkcd cartoon to my desk, fine, lol, a minor surprise in my day. If you print 1000 pages of dicks while I'm not home so that my paper and toner run out, that would be uncool. After years of caring about this problem, I came to believe that this kind of normative social contract cannot scale to include "everyone in the entire world," and that this kind of unwritten normative code is the only thing that makes any social space tolerable.
That is correct. IPSec sucks but we have already paid the price of being forced to figure it out in big organizations, so, not much motivation to figure out another thing.
It is as small as it says. BGP/IPSec might be silly at its size, but it was also the path of least resistance given the background of the people in the Bureau of Lan Management. I guess it was also for lolz to see if these things could be made stable and reliable without the big-organization clownery that we constantly run into.
nope it was exactly that; transactional customer state in giant xml documents in an xml-document-storing database. Bugs would cause them to grow to 10, 20, 100MB.
Was working for MarkLogic and got pulled into this a couple days before launch. That sort of thing was the least of their worries. They got the model wrong. With ACA, you were not allowed to do policy pricing on preexisting conditions. Age, sex, smoking, and location. That really only leaves one variable - location - for the actuarial folks to create unique policies. You might suspect how this breaks things. A healthy 18yo female in Tampa could have hundreds of thousands of policies. Live on a superfund site... hey, about those 3 spendy options. Those files could be massive - hundreds of MB. The log files... ye gods... those things grew in GB fast.
The other gotcha was Java is single inheritance. Foo > XML. Bar extends Foo > XML. Baz extends Foo > /dev/null the Bar bits in the persistence layer.
The MarkLogic bits did OK. When everything went sideways at launch, almost no traffic was getting all the way to the back end. Because things were getting profiled, there was way more time to tune and tweak the indexes as they tried to re-engineer things. The NoSQL bits helped there, as it made it a bit easier to morph things as it was refactored.
Not to say there were not pain points or they did not have a silly amount of hardware in it in the end.
One of the more memorable things for me was working in the XOC, having an update go sideways in the early AM, and seeing CNN pop up a ticker saying ACA was down. Good times.
According to Paul Smith, who has an AMA about healthcare.gov at Lobster.rs[0], the database was MarkLogic, which started out as an XML database, according to its Wikipedia page[1] (Paul also mentions this briefly his 10th anniversary post). According to another commenter[2], who says he met a MarkLogic manager on a plane flight, MarkLogic had passed some sort audit/certification that only Oracle had previously passed, which may explain why it was used for healthcare.gov.
(Member of USDS) - I'm sorry we gave you a bad experience. It is not something I want to have happen to anyone.
If anyone asking "why is it so bad" actually genuinely wanted an answer, here is part of one: There's some finite amount of process change that we can absorb per unit time. We have tended not to prioritize process improvements that would reduce the risk of an individual getting a bad experience, in favor of ones that will increase the total yield of qualified hires. We know we are paying a price for this, so we keep an eye on places like HN to see how high it is.
(Member of USDS) - The answer is no, sorry. We prioritize assignments based on their potential to do the most good for the largest number of people, and do not pressure anybody to work against their conscience. But we can't reconcile rigid individual pre-conceived ideologies with the need to run a coherent and diverse group.
Consider the opposite scenario: should we hire somebody who "strictly refuses to assist in any way with providing government handouts to undeserving moochers?" Such a person would be an obvious liability, given current priorities.
If I hired the first group and not the second, then we'd become an explicitly partisan and ideological operation, that still has to work with a Democrat administration and a Republican Congress. That's a whole new level of pain that I need like a hole in the head.
