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I have never worked on a high traffic site before, so I am just mostly talking out of my ass. But when I looked at the html source for the coveredca website, it

by vinhboy 13y ago

I have never worked on a high traffic site before, so I am just mostly talking out of my ass. But when I looked at the html source for the coveredca website, it had a lot of of basic problems: there were 3 DOCTYPES on one page, developer comments were still visible (you can actually see the names of all the developers who worked on the project), Java error pages were visible, they disabled the back button completely by enforcing javascript refreshing, they did not minify any of their assets (which would also remove the developer comments) AND they were actually loading many copies of the same assets multiple times because, like I said earlier, their site had 3-DOCTYPES in one html page. As someone who has never worked on a huge site, I don't want to naively say that it could have been done better. But I feel like those are basic issues that could have easily saved them a lot of bandwidth. Also, it seems to me that if they had so many issues on the front-end, it's a hint that maybe they also had many similar issues in the backend as well.

ericd 13y ago
Yeah, the CA version (https://www.coveredca.com/ https://www.coveredca.com/) had so many visual glitches and various problems (404s and 500s), I threw up in my mouth a little when I found out that Accenture charged the state over 180M to build it and another 174M to operate it for four years. I don't know how that's possible.
- scarmig 13y ago
  Are you serious? Christ.
- akjetma 13y ago
  Do you have a source for those numbers? I need to vomit, but I can't without a source. edit: Nevermind: http://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture-chosen-to-implement-california-health-insurance-exchange.htm http://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture-chosen-to-imple... Vomit everywhere.
- frozenport 13y ago
  I had a job interview with Accenture that had 2 parts a dinner and a technical chat. 1. At the dinner their representative spoke about how life at Accenture was a breeze and how as a undergraduate he spent most of this time drinking. He drank on the weekdays but his favorite time to drink was on Sundays. He said he used to do some SQL but now he had moved onto the business side of things. One of the candidates told us how his hobby of skydiving let him see the big picture and another told us that his desi background would enabled to come up culture specific features for software services. I probed this question further, and he said that in India showing your muscles was considered hubris, while in America it made you look strong. On his facebook page he wouldn't show his bare chest... Nobody at the table `looked` like they could do any programming work. 2. During the technical interview I was asked what `clubs` I was in. I told them I wasn't in many clubs and instead spent my time doing research work (which by that time had yield publications) and administrating websites. I told them my hobby was programming. I wanted to tell them how I dealt with EC2 sight outages, worked with clients and their clients to write WordPress plugins. I wanted to talk about my experience engineering our production and outsourcing workflow. I wanted to summarize the techniques I learned overseeing our production staff. They didn't comprehend and asked he what `clubs` I was in. I was scheduled to have 3 interviews, I walked out after the first. Don't work for Accenture, they are a joke because their employees are a joke, which is much in agreement with this article. They also have 275,000 employees.
  - tedsanders 13y ago
    I often wonder if this attitude makes the problem worse. If good programmers don't work for Accenture because Accenture is full of bad programmers, then how can Accenture ever become better? How can it evolve to provide better contracting services? If you were in charge of Accenture hiring strategy, what would you change?
    - danmaz74 13y ago
      IMHO they would need to acknowledge there is a problem and launch a public program to fix it. "Come fix the biggest consulting company in the world" could attract top talent. But they just can't do it, even if they wanted - how would customers react?
- nostromo 13y ago
  The WA version (https://wahealthplanfinder.org/ https://wahealthplanfinder.org/) doesn't redirect you to www, so if you click that link you get a big red SSL warning. This caused a number of people to worry that this was one of those scam exchanges people had been warned about. Total cost: $54.8 million
  - cdcarter 13y ago
    Plus, it doesn't allow the #-sign in the address lines...
- smsm42 13y ago
  Wow! Given how awful it was on Oct 1 and that it was broken under the load of less than 10 req/s [1], it is outrageous how much it costed. It is probably standard for the government contracts everywhere, but when it is where I know how badly it is done and how much it costs, it's just doubly disgusting. [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-california-health-exchange-glitches-20131001,0,7108713.story http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-california-he... BTW it looks like Accenture is not the only one. This page: https://www.coveredca.com/shopandcompare/#calculator https://www.coveredca.com/shopandcompare/#calculator has this in the source: Produced for Covered California and the State of California by Kiefer Consulting, Inc. www.kieferconsulting.com (and then for some reason Apache license - copy-paste from somewhere?) So 180M might be just one part of it, the whole sum may be much bigger.
JangoSteve 13y ago
Interestingly enough, healthcare.gov itself is open source and uses Jekyll for the static site. It seems to be decently done. But the marketplace itself I guess is a whole different story. https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov
swamp40 13y ago
This article on the Healthcare.gov authors (Development Seed) from back in June makes me so mad I could spit. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/healthcaregov-code-developed-by-the-people-and-for-the-people-released-back-to-the-people/277295/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/health... Especially these paragraphs: "When we worked with the World Bank, they chose a plan from Rackspace for 16 servers," said Gundersen. "That added tens of thousands of dollars, with a huge hosting bill every month." HHS had similar strategic plans for the new site, at least at first. "They were planning 32 servers, between staging, production and disaster recovery, with application servers for different environments," said Cole. "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."

by vinhboy 13y ago

ericd 13y ago

Yeah, the CA version (https://www.coveredca.com/ https://www.coveredca.com/) had so many visual glitches and various problems (404s and 500s), I threw up in my mouth a little when I found out that Accenture charged the state over 180M to build it and another 174M to operate it for four years. I don't know how that's possible.

scarmig 13y ago
Are you serious? Christ.
akjetma 13y ago
Do you have a source for those numbers? I need to vomit, but I can't without a source. edit: Nevermind: http://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture-chosen-to-implement-california-health-insurance-exchange.htm http://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture-chosen-to-imple... Vomit everywhere.
frozenport 13y ago
I had a job interview with Accenture that had 2 parts a dinner and a technical chat. 1. At the dinner their representative spoke about how life at Accenture was a breeze and how as a undergraduate he spent most of this time drinking. He drank on the weekdays but his favorite time to drink was on Sundays. He said he used to do some SQL but now he had moved onto the business side of things. One of the candidates told us how his hobby of skydiving let him see the big picture and another told us that his desi background would enabled to come up culture specific features for software services. I probed this question further, and he said that in India showing your muscles was considered hubris, while in America it made you look strong. On his facebook page he wouldn't show his bare chest... Nobody at the table `looked` like they could do any programming work. 2. During the technical interview I was asked what `clubs` I was in. I told them I wasn't in many clubs and instead spent my time doing research work (which by that time had yield publications) and administrating websites. I told them my hobby was programming. I wanted to tell them how I dealt with EC2 sight outages, worked with clients and their clients to write WordPress plugins. I wanted to talk about my experience engineering our production and outsourcing workflow. I wanted to summarize the techniques I learned overseeing our production staff. They didn't comprehend and asked he what `clubs` I was in. I was scheduled to have 3 interviews, I walked out after the first. Don't work for Accenture, they are a joke because their employees are a joke, which is much in agreement with this article. They also have 275,000 employees.
- tedsanders 13y ago
  I often wonder if this attitude makes the problem worse. If good programmers don't work for Accenture because Accenture is full of bad programmers, then how can Accenture ever become better? How can it evolve to provide better contracting services? If you were in charge of Accenture hiring strategy, what would you change?
  - danmaz74 13y ago
    IMHO they would need to acknowledge there is a problem and launch a public program to fix it. "Come fix the biggest consulting company in the world" could attract top talent. But they just can't do it, even if they wanted - how would customers react?
nostromo 13y ago
The WA version (https://wahealthplanfinder.org/ https://wahealthplanfinder.org/) doesn't redirect you to www, so if you click that link you get a big red SSL warning. This caused a number of people to worry that this was one of those scam exchanges people had been warned about. Total cost: $54.8 million
- cdcarter 13y ago
  Plus, it doesn't allow the #-sign in the address lines...
smsm42 13y ago
Wow! Given how awful it was on Oct 1 and that it was broken under the load of less than 10 req/s [1], it is outrageous how much it costed. It is probably standard for the government contracts everywhere, but when it is where I know how badly it is done and how much it costs, it's just doubly disgusting. [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-california-health-exchange-glitches-20131001,0,7108713.story http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-california-he... BTW it looks like Accenture is not the only one. This page: https://www.coveredca.com/shopandcompare/#calculator https://www.coveredca.com/shopandcompare/#calculator has this in the source: Produced for Covered California and the State of California by Kiefer Consulting, Inc. www.kieferconsulting.com (and then for some reason Apache license - copy-paste from somewhere?) So 180M might be just one part of it, the whole sum may be much bigger.

JangoSteve 13y ago

Interestingly enough, healthcare.gov itself is open source and uses Jekyll for the static site. It seems to be decently done. But the marketplace itself I guess is a whole different story. https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov

swamp40 13y ago

This article on the Healthcare.gov authors (Development Seed) from back in June makes me so mad I could spit. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/healthcaregov-code-developed-by-the-people-and-for-the-people-released-back-to-the-people/277295/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/health... Especially these paragraphs: "When we worked with the World Bank, they chose a plan from Rackspace for 16 servers," said Gundersen. "That added tens of thousands of dollars, with a huge hosting bill every month." HHS had similar strategic plans for the new site, at least at first. "They were planning 32 servers, between staging, production and disaster recovery, with application servers for different environments," said Cole. "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."