News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the req... by chucknelson on Monday October 21, 2013 @12:51PM (#6586701)
Wow, this particular excerpt from the article is stretching things a bit too thin:

"Clearly there are problems with the government’s IT procurement processes, but if the same level of dysfunction had been present in the software behind Obama’s political campaign (as it was, apparently, behind Romney’s) the President would have never been reelected."

Really? I doubt the campaign websites were the deciding factor.

Anyway, a lot of speculation in this article...not very insightful or informative.

Re:Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the req... by skwirl on Monday October 21, 2013 @01:16PM (#6586857)
They aren't talking about the campaign websites. Both campaigns had complex internal software systems to help target field worker campaign activities, get out the vote efforts, monitor and respond to turnout data on election day, etc.

According to various reports, the Obama campaign was hugely successful in this endeavor [1] while the Romney campaign's election day voter turnout system was a disaster [2].

[1] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/software-deve...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/romney-project-orca-disaster-...

Re:Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the req... by twistedpair on Monday October 21, 2013 @01:49PM (#6587085)
But that is a very agile, very incentive aligned project. You don't need to negotiate compromises and tip toe around various laws to run some stats for your media predictive analytics. Your vendors want you to continue in the campaign, so they still have contracts. Everyone is running for the same goal line.

Health care and insurance entitlement programs are clearly orders of magnitude more quadmired before a single line of code is written.

Re:Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the req... by ebiester on Monday October 21, 2013 @01:06PM (#6586789)
The software in question was the software used to determine the best media buys, the volunteer organization software, and similar that was known to be part of his advantage.