Obamacare, healthcare.gov, and how government software gets made

It’s been in the news lately: the healthcare.gov site, a component of the Affordable Care Act, fell flat on its face at launch. It was unable to handle the crush of people seeking health-insurance information. I have empathy for the people who built the site, because I’ve built government software before and it was way harder than it needed to be. Here’s my story, at my software-development blog.