I'm one of the engineers working on fixing healthcare.gov with a whole bunch of other Silicon Valley engineers. See relevant Time article and Hacker News discussion a couple of weeks ago:
There are certainly problems here, but that's why it's even more important to have talented people (especially engineers or SREs) come help. If you know anybody who'd like to help on a temporary rotation or permanently, please point them to:
Since the SRE dream team fixed healthcare.gov so quickly, it seems it must have been mostly done decently well, but lacking a bit in QA and followthrough. Or do you think you could have put a web/db system in place from a cold start just about as fast?
I'm part of a small team that's been working on healthcare.gov for the last few months alongside a bunch of other Google, Facebook, and Y Combinator alums.
We'll always remember what Mikey told us in December, after the site was back up, could handle a non-trivial amount of traffic, and people who wanted health insurance could finally get it:
"1 in 1000 uninsured people die each year. It's not an exaggeration to say that due to the work we're doing here, 5,000-10,000 people will live to see the end of 2014. You should be proud of what you've done, but we should also all be grateful to have this opportunity."
We're all grateful to be here, but there's a hell of a lot more work to be done.
If any of you out there are an amazing software engineer or SRE, and want to help make our government work better, please shoot us an email: brandon@hcgov.us
Right now, we're looking for folks who can move to the Baltimore/DC area for at least 1-3 months -- it's just hard to get stuff done in this environment without being here in-person!
Right now, we've all been pitching in on 1-3 month rotations to the DC/Baltimore area. (If you'd be interested in helping but can't necessarily move to Maryland... stay tuned :) .)
Full stack engineer to help lay the foundation of our engineering team.
Interested in getting in on the ground floor of fundamentally changing the way people travel or, as one of our users said, "restoring people's faith in humanity"?
Interested in getting in on the ground floor of fundamentally changing the way people travel or, as one of our users said, "restoring people's faith in humanity"?
The site was built with Ruby 1.9.2 + Rails 3.1 (+ SASS and Coffeescript), jQuery (+ UI), and PostgreSQL on top of Heroku (Cedar Stack + Unicorn + Memcached) using Facebook Connect and the Google Maps API. We've just been hacking on it for a little while now but the more pertinent point is that we still have plenty of hacking to do :)
"Remember that your mind is a fortress of impenetrable happiness."
Common words of wisdom that never seem to be taken to heart nearly enough. Reminded me of another gem from Daniel Gross of Greplin:
"It’s very important to constantly tell yourself if anything, how lucky you are to be here in the first place. Even if you aren’t in the valley, remember how lucky you are to live in the 21st century."
Congrats Art! Thanks for showing us what fortresses can do ;)
"The third reason we took Sequoia’s money, specifically Sequoia and not another VC, was we deal with a lot of these different API providers. It’s very important to us to maintain very good relationships with a lot of these companies because we have a higher than average volume of requests that we have to make to them. And finally, we thought Sequoia was the best place to go for this because they’ve had their hand in or know someone at almost every interesting tech company in the world, and that network is super important to us."
Very, very cool. The fact I'm instantly down my CC info and $60 on three purchases is some incredibly convincing concept validation for myself, but the potential here, both in terms of impact and unique experiences, is unimaginably cool.
One important thing to note, you need to make your referral codes and messaging (i.e. refer a friend and you both win) more prominent. I told my friend about the site and when he asked me for a referral code, I had no clue what he was talking about, since apparently you don't get a referral code if you sign up in the purchase flow and I had to sign up with a secondary fake account to see what the deal was. So you probably want to:
1) Make the referral code actually accessible on the account page (It currently isn't there at all? Unless I'm in some n-way test?)
2) Make the referral code available on every completed transaction. Personally, I'd also recommend tossing in that cute turtle that appears during signup :)
3) Send the referral code, and whole welcome email, for that matter, to the user if they come in through the payment flow.
4) Add an entry on how to find your personal referral code in the FAQ.
Given the empirical success of such tactics (PayPal especially comes to mind) and especially given that many people will want to enjoy these experiences with their friends, you really want to make sure the user is aware of the promotion. Obviously, there are some considerations regarding the cost as you give out $10 and make less than 12% back after fees, but if you're going to run it on the traditional sign-up flow, you might as well put it everywhere. Especially since people who sign up via the purchase flow or make a purchase would be much more likely to refer their friends, since they've already validated the service.
Anyways, congratulations on the launch. See you guys at lunch ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7312442
There are certainly problems here, but that's why it's even more important to have talented people (especially engineers or SREs) come help. If you know anybody who'd like to help on a temporary rotation or permanently, please point them to:
jobs@hcgov.us