🔗 Serving a billion web requests with boring code

When I worked as a contractor to the US government at ad hoc, I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to design large parts of a relaunch of medicare plan compare, the US government site through which hundreds of thousands of medicare recipients purchase their health care plans each year.

We released after about a year of development, and were able to help millions of people find and purchase health care

• if you're in the US, you are pretty likely to know somebody who used this system.

Though the US health care system is incredibly awful in many respects, I'm very proud of what the team I worked with was able to build in a short time frame and under a lot of constraints.

The team of people that I worked with - managers, designers, engineers and business analysts - were excellent from top to bottom. I've never before experienced such a dedicated, collaborative, trusting team, and I learned a tremendous amount from them.

I especially want to share this story because I want to show that quality software can get written under government constraints. It can! And if we all start believing that it can, we're more likely to produce it.

continue reading on notes.billmill.org

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