Year: 2013
500 Million Lines of Code?
500 million lines of code. That’s how big the source code is for HealthCare.gov, according to this article at the New York Times. That number has since been repeated in a CNN editorial by Julianne Pepitone. That can’t be right. I know for a fact you can build a healthcare enrollment site in under a… Read more
More Interesting News About HealthCare.gov Problems
Lena H. Sun and Scott Wilson in the Washington Post have a pretty good article about the HealthCare.gov mess that tells us more about what’s going wrong. Let’s start with the specification for the load: CGI built the shopping and enrollment applications to accommodate 60,000 users at the same time. U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd… Read more
In Software Engineering, Sometimes Failure Is the Only Option
On day one of the HealthCare.gov roll-out, I explained that first-day glitches in a large production web site are meaningless. With only a few specialized exceptions (and some lucky ones) things always go wrong on the first day. It’s a normal part of the shakedown process, and not necessarily a reason to get upset. However,… Read more
If Aliens Came…
Saw this on Facebook the other day: Well, yeah, we probably would declare the aliens persons and give them money if they also Generated all the energy we consume. Manufactured all the medical devices that save our lives. Grew all the food we eat. Designed and manufactured all the clothes we like to wear. Created… Read more
Drug Laws Are Not Victimless
Last month at Hercules and the Umpire, federal judge Richard Kopf posted an explanation of why he believes that (at least at the federal level) drug crimes are not victimless. Matt Brown at Tempe Criminal Defense has raised some objections, as has Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice. Given that a federal judge and a couple… Read more