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If anyone's interested, I've been working on an issue tracker & locally runnable version of the marketplace in a new repo[1] that was spawned from the former is

by STRML 13y ago

If anyone's interested, I've been working on an issue tracker & locally runnable version of the marketplace in a new repo[1] that was spawned from the former issue tracker on the removed repository. It has some issues with hardcoded redirects coming back from their API calls, but it's a start. I originally made it just to simply demonstrate how a few small changes could make a large performance difference, but I've kept it up due to encouragement from some friends and hopes that somebody inside the project will use some of the code or make changes based on it. [1] https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace

ricardobeat 13y ago
Is this actual production code? https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/master/app/js/ee/ https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/mas... It's way below the quality you'd expect from a modern front-end. Poor standards, undocumented code, monolithic sources, hard-coded data all around. Despite using Backbone and other modern frameworks, it looks like something a novice JS developer would concoct, not a project in the millions... My favorite part so far (https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/master/app/js/ee/eeCommon.js#L363-L377 https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/mas...): //got this from the internets //fetchs the URL parameters function getUrlVars() { ...
- STRML 13y ago
  Yep, this is 100% real code, taken from the current working site. The initial commit is exactly the code that you would download every time you visited the site (and re-download, and re-download, as they failed to set caching headers). My hope is to reorganize it into a sane set of Backbone views & rich models so it makes a lot more sense. There seems to be a lot of dead code so pruning that is the first priority. Every function is in the global scope so it's actually somewhat easy to detect what is used and what is not... not that I'd ever advocate throwing everything in the global scope. I agree that it is much less than you'd think that amount of money would buy. I hope that by bringing attention to it, I can make it clear to taxpayers and government decision-makers that we are not getting anything close to what we are paying for. The system for winning government contracts needs to be completely revamped, at least for the technical sector. I would love to see a competition-style bidding process, where a detailed set of specs are presented and all submissions that meet the spec are paid, and the winning submission is paid more. $92M buys you a lot of runway. I think we could have seen some much better code out of this if small businesses & independent groups were allowed to tackle it.
- knowtheory 13y ago
  Remember how this went down. DevelopmentSeed (the guys behind MapBox) designed & developed a frontend site and then handed it over to HHS. That's where the good stuff comes from. Clearly however, whoever received the project from that point onwards doesn't understand things like asset minification or packaging. My completely random conjecture is that whoever inherited DevelopmentSeed's code does not know how this stuff should work. Also see: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/problems_with_healthcare_gov_cronyism_bad_management_and_too_many_cooks.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/pro...

by STRML 13y ago

ricardobeat 13y ago

Is this actual production code? https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/master/app/js/ee/ https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/mas... It's way below the quality you'd expect from a modern front-end. Poor standards, undocumented code, monolithic sources, hard-coded data all around. Despite using Backbone and other modern frameworks, it looks like something a novice JS developer would concoct, not a project in the millions... My favorite part so far (https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/master/app/js/ee/eeCommon.js#L363-L377 https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/mas...): //got this from the internets //fetchs the URL parameters function getUrlVars() { ...

STRML 13y ago
Yep, this is 100% real code, taken from the current working site. The initial commit is exactly the code that you would download every time you visited the site (and re-download, and re-download, as they failed to set caching headers). My hope is to reorganize it into a sane set of Backbone views & rich models so it makes a lot more sense. There seems to be a lot of dead code so pruning that is the first priority. Every function is in the global scope so it's actually somewhat easy to detect what is used and what is not... not that I'd ever advocate throwing everything in the global scope. I agree that it is much less than you'd think that amount of money would buy. I hope that by bringing attention to it, I can make it clear to taxpayers and government decision-makers that we are not getting anything close to what we are paying for. The system for winning government contracts needs to be completely revamped, at least for the technical sector. I would love to see a competition-style bidding process, where a detailed set of specs are presented and all submissions that meet the spec are paid, and the winning submission is paid more. $92M buys you a lot of runway. I think we could have seen some much better code out of this if small businesses & independent groups were allowed to tackle it.
knowtheory 13y ago
Remember how this went down. DevelopmentSeed (the guys behind MapBox) designed & developed a frontend site and then handed it over to HHS. That's where the good stuff comes from. Clearly however, whoever received the project from that point onwards doesn't understand things like asset minification or packaging. My completely random conjecture is that whoever inherited DevelopmentSeed's code does not know how this stuff should work. Also see: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/problems_with_healthcare_gov_cronyism_bad_management_and_too_many_cooks.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/pro...