
Healthcare.gov: Code by the People, for the People, Released Back to the People - richoakley
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/healthcaregov-code-developed-by-the-people-and-for-the-people-released-back-to-the-people/277295/
======
danso
The use of Jekyll (or any static HTML generator) is a really huge, positive
conceptual step. I mean, we can now make edits -- in Markdown -- to individual
blog posts and submit pull requests.

Whether they actually honor those requests* is another thing, but this is a
really cool step. Even the use of Markdown means that the site/content
designers have to _really work_ to obfuscate the content with unnecessary
modules/widgets/etc.

Regardless of the merits of the administration's policies and initiatives, I
hope this catches on. 95% of the government websites I've seen, from city
council to federal, could be rendered in static HTML...and maintained much
more easily.

* edit: Only one way to find out: [https://github.com/dannguyen/healthcare.gov/commit/6438498ea...](https://github.com/dannguyen/healthcare.gov/commit/6438498eab1bc773c55bf567830ac71abcd82c02)

~~~
JPKab
The huge leap that has to be made for Federal Government CIOs is the
psychological attachment they have made between software that works and huge
price tags.

Sometime, long before I ever came along, CIOs in the Federal sector became
convinced that the only way for software to work was for it to be big, sold by
SAP/Microsoft/Oracle, and have a huge pricetag. Anything else is a huge risk
in their world.

They just don't believe that something that takes so little money, man-hours,
and time to implement can possibly satisfy their requirements and replace such
a huge portfolio of bloated legacy systems.

I built a metadata management system in a few weeks as a "rapid prototype" for
a branch of the US military. It satisfied all of their requirements, was fast,
secure, and stable. It was storing all of the production data and was made to
be production ready by simply flipping a switch. Then the CIO saw it.

"Wow, this is amazing. Can you give the code to Team X so they can build it in
Sharepoint?" 8 months later, a stunted, awful version of my prototype was
demoed. The thick-client interface was gone, replaced by the awful, non-
responsive Sharepoint bullshit. The Postgres back end that cost nothing was
replaced with an expensively licensed SQL Server DB. The Google-like "search
as you type" capability that was in my "prototype" was gone. Infinite
scrolling in the grids was gone. Did I mention that they force their users to
use Internet Explorer 8 because of "security reasons"? Never in my life have I
witnessed such a huge level of IT incompetences as that on display in the
United States military. This is almost surely due to endless bloated budgets
which allow wankers like this to continue to keep their jobs.

~~~
madh
"Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM."

------
imjared
The folks at Development Seed are doing really awesome work between Prose and
MapBox and it's great to see them get some recognition for it.

Also a great plug for Jekyll in general. While there can certainly be more
worrisome factors than cost for a site, site performance should be one of the
most important issues when launching. By completely getting rid of a backing
database, page lookup times can be reduced dramatically. As Prose continues to
mature, it's getting more and more flexible by the day. Just last week they
implemented an extensible "tagging" feature for posts:
[https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/464](https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/464).

In case you haven't noticed, I'm a fan. Kudos to dev seed and big props to the
White House team for the willingness to move away from Drupal.

~~~
epoxyhockey
_The folks at Development Seed are doing really awesome work_

I am also a member of the Development Seed fan club, having met many of the
team members. Though, I feel like they should update their PR statement. Every
time they are mentioned in an article, the Drupal past comes out: _The startup
first made its mark in the DC tech scene consulting on Drupal_ I think we can
all agree that mentioning one's history working with Drupal is not going to
convey a feeling of cutting edge work by a, frankly, team of brilliant
engineers like Dev Seed. I have done work with Drupal in the past, yet it does
not appear on my resume.

Instead, they could be saying something like: Development Seed, makers of
Mapbox and Tile Mill, which directly competes with Google Maps products, and
in many ways is better, develops and promotes technologies and methodologies
reminiscent of Bay Area start-ups.

These guys really do not get enough credit, even with a minor mention in the
Atlantic article.

~~~
snowwrestler
Their history with Drupal is a key part of their value story in DC, where
Drupal _is_ cutting edge--it is rapidly replacing expensive proprietary CMS
solutions for many federal agencies and nonprofits.

Although it might be hard to believe here on HN, saying something is
"reminiscent of Bay Area start-ups" means jack squat to the folks in DC who
spend a lot of money on web projects.

------
adolph
_Last week, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
relaunched Healthcare.gov with a new appearance and modern technology that is
unusual in federal-government websites._

The article seems to be about a promotional/propaganda CMS for the government,
am I missing something?

 _" This is such a lean site," said Jon Booth_

 _" This is our ultimate dogfooding experience," said Eric Gundersen_

 _" The work that they're doing is amazing," said Sivak_

 _the site is just one component of the insurance exchanges. Others may not be
ready by the October deadline._

~~~
smacktoward
It is definitely amazing how brilliant and successful every decision on a
project turns out to be when you only interview the people who made those
decisions!

~~~
digiphile
I didn't just interview the people who made those decisions. I've talked to
dozens of federal and state CIOs over the years, along with many contractors
and Web developers. The consensus amongst insiders and industry observers is
that this approach and outcome are genuinely novel and innovative in the
government space, which is why I wrote the feature to begin with, starting
months ago.

~~~
smacktoward
This would have been more evident if any of those people had been quoted in
the story. It also would have made the story more compelling -- as it stands,
it reads like a bunch of colleagues congratulating each other on what fine
work they have done.

~~~
digiphile
Fair point. And ouch, I think. Just so it's clear, I'm not their colleague --
and the contractors in question weren't obligated to praise CMS. I'd hoped
that readers would find the perspective of the writer useful, in addition to
the comments of the principals, whose interests are obvious. Thank you for the
feedback.

~~~
protomyth
"and the contractors in question weren't obligated to praise CMS"

If you are a government contractor and some reporter asks you about a
government project, the response is going to be positive (or at least
obfuscated) unless you would like to have no more government contracts.

------
angersock
This reads like the worst marketing mashup this year:

" _We knew there were performance and reliability benefits from building the
stack on HTML. "_

I know there are performance and reliability benefits from talking in English.

" _You 're just talking about content. There just needs to be one server.
We're going to have two, with one for backup. That's a deduction of 30
servers_"

I'm very happy the government decided to skimp on reliability for a public
healthcare market.

" _You can put Wordpress into Amazon but then you 'll have problems; it wasn't
designed to be a cloud application._"

Wait wait wait Wordpress isn't a cloud app? Fuck, someone go tell Hostgator
that--apparently it can't be done!

" _Notably, the HHS team has been using feedback to drive design choices from
the beginning, applying the 'lean startup' model to development._"

Wow, even the lean startup namedrop.

I'd be a lot happier if, instead of putting the Obama webdev team on the gravy
train, they spent that same money--you know--actually fixing healthcare. As it
is they seem to be just doing free advertising and lead generation on the
public dime for the insurance companies.

~~~
digiphile
I can think of any number of blog posts that pack more buzzwords per paragraph
than this, but your experience may vary.
[http://mobile.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/d...](http://mobile.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/disrupting_disruption_a_once_useful_concept_has_become_a_lame_catchphrase.html)

To your substantive point, no one skimped on reliability here. The content was
pushed into Akamai precisely so it would always be available, quickly, to end
users. Reducing servers in this context isn't skimping -- it's saving money by
using modern Web tech. Developing this site also wasn't an option, as your
comment implies: the law required its development and deployment. If you'd
like public funds directed elsewhere, call your Congressional representatives.

~~~
docthink
but that doesn't seem super innovative. others in government have used akamai
as origin servers--TSA then DHS did this in 06 and got rid of a bunch of
servers.

------
jmedwards
The UK Government Digital Service still kicks its ass at (a) startup methods)
and (b) execution :-)

[http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/](http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/)

[https://www.gov.uk/](https://www.gov.uk/)

[https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples](https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples)

~~~
digiphile
It may come as no surprise that Mullen cited the GDS team as an inspiration.

------
nopal
I'm very eager to see how they handle the actual exchange code.

Jekyll and static HTML make a lot of sense for a marketing/informational site
(which this appears to be right now), but at some point, they're going to need
a dynamic backend (right?). These exchanges will need to aggregate plan info
from lots of different insurance carriers and display plans to people based on
various bits of user-specific info. Perhaps they can generate static info
pages for all of the plans and redirect people to these pages via JavaScript
and then pass the actual enrollment off to the insurance companies.

If they have to support enrollment and dynamic content, it will be interesting
to see how they do so while adhering to their principles of simplicity.

If they don't, it will be an interesting example of how to embrace simple
solutions where possible while preventing scope creep.

Either way, I'm glad to see this type of innovative development happening.

~~~
herge
One "website" can have multiple backends: static files prepared with Jekyl for
the CMS part of it, and a full backend for any dynamic bits. You can feed both
in the same page with judicious use of AJAX.

~~~
nopal
Of course. And if they do implement such a JavaScript-dependant approach, it
will be entirely different from any other government site. As I said, I look
forward to seeing how they progress.

------
damncabbage
A link to the GitHub source:
[https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov](https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov)

(The article buries the link to the page with the link:
[https://www.healthcare.gov/developers](https://www.healthcare.gov/developers)
)

~~~
digiphile
Thank you for sharing the link to github. At the time of submission, the code
wasn't available yet there.

------
talmand
So, does this mean they learned some important lessons from the $18 million
recover.gov site?

As for Percussion, is the Sivak person saying that it takes a month to make a
simple navigation change? Is this really about the CMS or the red tape
involved in getting approval to make the change?

~~~
digiphile
There's a lot to be learned from Recovery.gov, not all negative. In this case,
the HHS CTO was referring to a change in the CMS itself, not the website(s) it
controls. Getting code updated in the normal .gov contractor/sub-contractor
model would generally take more time, both in terms of requirements and
implementation.

~~~
docthink
I am skeptical. Seems more in the implementation of the CMS. Not a fan of
percussion, but I have seen drupal implementations that tied content to
presentation also take an stunningly long amount of time for a navigation
change. Bad design. Bad implementation.

------
systematical
This has not been "iteratively created on Github". It has one commit and 1
commit only. Just sayin...

[https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov/commits/master](https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov/commits/master)

Still cool its open sourced though.

~~~
cjoh
From what I know of the project, CMS has a GitHub enterprise account that they
used internally to "iteratively create on github," this Repo is the one that
moved over after release.

It's a big step to have government releasing ANYTHING on Github. And yes, it's
the next logical step for them to _start_ projects on GitHub. But they're not
there yet -- its worth noting that neither Sunlight nor Code for America start
their projects out in the open 100% of the time either. It's new ground, and
government will, I think, move more towards developing out in the open as we
progress. But for now, I'm pretty excited that they embraced technology from
this decade.

I should note I'm the former Director of Sunlight Labs, and am an advisor to
Code for America.

~~~
digiphile
As I understand it, that's correct: built using Github Enterprise internaly
and then published publicly. There _was_ code in public, on the Development
Seed account, with respect to coding for the project; anyone can go look at
the commits there. Your other points speak for themselves.

------
boneheadmed
Sorry, not feeling very patriotic about this. "by the people, for the people,
released back to the people." Meanwhile those of the people who are physicians
have had their fees sequestered by 2%
[http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/781630](http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/781630)
and are awash in extra paperwork for trying to prescribe something as simple
as diabetic test strips as funding is tightened:
[http://www.pharmacist.com/cms-cuts-reimbursement-diabetes-
te...](http://www.pharmacist.com/cms-cuts-reimbursement-diabetes-test-
supplies)

~~~
freehunter
Your first link is login-only.

~~~
boneheadmed
I logged out first to check that. Oh well. Here is another related:
[http://www.ama-
assn.org/ama/pub/news/news/2013-03-01-stateme...](http://www.ama-
assn.org/ama/pub/news/news/2013-03-01-statement-on-sequestration-cuts.page)

------
ckluis
How long until a wordpress theme based on this is on themeforest?

