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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

December, 2013

Reporting Technology

The lack of serious technical reporting on Healthcare.gov
Consider this part of an early New Year's resolution to blog more (I really am going to make a run at it in 2014). Anyway, over the holiday break I, along with many others I'm sure, was having a conversation about Healthcare.gov. I mostly mentioned all the stuff I wrote a few months ago (basically that the things that ruined the project seem to be all the regular stuff -- scope creep, too many players -- that ruins projects), but I also talked a bit about my disappointment with the media's reporting of the story. Specifically, the inability to do any serious technical reporting.

The New York Times had the deepest reporting I read and that didn't come close to actually explaining what went wrong. The story included laughable (to technologists) lines like this: "By mid-November, more than six weeks after the rollout, the MarkLogic database — essentially the website’s virtual filing cabinet and index — continued to perform below expectations, according to one person who works in the command center." While I understand not everyone is familiar with a database, to call it a virtual filing cabinet and index only says to me that the author has absolutely no idea what a database is. 

The point isn't to pick on the Times, though. Rather it's just to point out that as technical stories continue to pile up (NSA and Healthcare.gov were amongst the biggest media focus areas of the last three months), we're going to have to get better at technical reporting. That I still haven't read a decent explanation of what went wrong technically seems, to me at least, as a major disservice and a dangerous signal for society's ability to keep up with technical change.
December 28, 2013
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.