[ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov

[Kelly Anderson]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 9:26 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>  All this they did, wrecked the system and influenced government for
> perhaps a decade, all in order to gobble up private data on the proletariat.
>

Spike, what is the basis for believing that the health care site failed
because of data collection and not because of poor engineering?

My understanding of the Healthcare.org web site problem increased greatly
yesterday, when I came to understand that they are using web services to
gather information from individual states, individual insurance companies,
and from the bureaucracy itself. All of this data and logic is needed to
perform the complex operation of coming up with a price (A really stinky
architecture, btw) and all of this data and logic is stored and maintained
by each party individually.

This means that if there is one weak link in the chain, you don't get an
answer. This is an Obaminable architecture.

A much better approach would have been to say:
1) You host your data and functions here (rackspace, whatever)
2) You answer the questions like so (standard APIs.)
3) test the hell out of it

This isn't rocket science, but the way they implemented it as a distributed
system maintained by 53+ separate entities, it only takes one entity being
a dumb ass to bring parts of the system to its knees.

-Kelly
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