Healthcare.gov-Marketplace

It gets worse - the UI team lead had an associate's degree in Art & Web Design from a community college, and a bachelor's in Zoology. [1] Normally, I would say credentials generally don't matter - but combined with the code quality, the argument writes itself. I started looking him up after seeing this mention (and the awful code below). [2] 1. http://www.linkedin.com/in/mkayan 2. https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/blob/mas...

I'm working on a proxy / community-run fork[1] of Healthcare.gov. After all the histrionics about the site's performance and bugs, and upon seeing that it was a Backbone.js app (which I develop full-time), and with unminified/commented source, I thought it might be worthwhile to pull as many files from the repo as I could so that bugs could be reported and fixed in the open. As the product sits today, it is close to being a functional clone of the site. Healthcare.gov relies on some very complicated and antiquated auth systems, from multiple agencies. It is not enough to simply proxy a few endpoints back to healthcare.gov, some requests need to be spoofed, state saved, etc., in order to make it work properly. They often use absolute URLs in their responses as well, which need to be rewritten. I can imagine this application was an absolute

A simple `find . -name '*.js' | xargs wc -l` on the marketplace repository at https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace reads about 72K LOC. About half of that is vendor scripts, such as jQuery. The 500M figure is quite obviously nonsense. Even if one adds the source of every tool involved, including the browsers used to display the site, it would be difficult to get to 500M. For example, Chrome is ~5M LOC, depending on comments/version.

Healthcare.gov is all opensource: https://www.healthcare.gov/developers/ Some chunks are made in node.js: https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace They've taken down the source on github, though it used to be all there. The server they're running it on is AkamaiGHost, and likely linux (although I've heard they're running some on it on windows) It's an odd choice of technologies. For scalability I would have chosen something that scales across the cloud easy. I'd put my money on the different calls between organisations being at fault. There seems to be many API calls going on. It would take only one server to be slow to cause a cascading affect.

While the server-side components may never become open-source or auditable (significant portions are based on existing, closed systems), the client-side code is easily auditable. If you have a chance, I would love to see what you would find by analyzing https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace. If you get a chance to look at it, please submit a PR.

I have a good chunk of the frontend up at https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace. As for the APIs, we will never see that code - Healthcare.gov reuses a large number of critical government systems that will likely stay closed forever or are paid vendor systems, like Oracle Access Manager.

Is this actual production code? 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/mas...): //got this from the internets //fetchs the URL parameters function getUrlVars() { ...

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