It’s time for a “commitment escalation”
Mikey Dickerson on why he moved from Google to the West Wing, and where we need to be allocating our engineering resources.
In a keynote address at Velocity New York 2014, Mikey Dickerson described his journey from working for Google to working in the West Wing of the White House, leading the US Digital Services group. He told the story of how a three-day review turned into a nine-week “herculean effort” by a team working 17 hours per day, 7 days per week to get HealthCare.gov up and running. The challenges, he stressed, boiled down to a few big, though basic, things — building a monitoring system, creating a war room to provide development direction and organization, and establishing a sense of urgency to get the problems fixed. “This very formidable obstacle, when you pushed on it even a little bit, fell apart; it was made out of sand,” he said. “Nothing we did was that hard; it was labor intensive, but it was not hard.”
The Future of AngularJS
Charting the progress towards AngularJS 2.0
AngularJS, for me, was a revelation the first time I encountered it. I was coming from using GWT (Google Web Toolkit), and seeing our large application shrink in lines of code by 90% was close to a spiritual experience. I was a convert from day one, because I knew how bad things were otherwise. Ever since, I have been associated with AngularJS in one way or another, and have seen how it makes things absolutely simple with data binding, templating, routing, unit testing, and so much more. But the more I used it, some things didn’t make sense, from naming to concepts. I got the hang of it, but I never really got to like why directives needed to be so complex, or how the built-in routing was quite limiting. While AngularJS made it trivial to write applications, it also made it trivial to write slow, hard-to-maintain applications if you didn’t understand how it all worked together.
Prepare for change now, and you’ll be ready for it later
Max Firtman on the future of mobile and the importance of embracing change.
Companies and developers have plenty of mobile development challenges — OS platforms, the growing number of devices and screen sizes, and the myriad requirements of browsers, to name a few. Soon — or already — the Internet of Things is going to muddy the waters further. In a recent interview, Max Firtman, founder of ITMaster, stressed the importance of the growing ubiquitousness of IoT and the necessity that companies embrace the future:
”Maybe in 10 years, we’re going to see devices everywhere sending input information to apps that might be in the server, in the cloud — and those apps will carry some kind of intelligence, and will bring us back information on other devices that could be a smart watch, smart glass, a phone; we don’t know, yet, exactly what will be here. But there are a lot of challenges there for content owners or companies because you need to understand that you’re going to be everywhere.
Not just the government’s playbook
The 13 principles in the U.S. CIO's Digital Services Playbook are applicable for everyone.
Whenever I hear someone say that “government should be run like a business,” my first reaction is “do you know how badly most businesses are run?” Seriously. I do not want my government to run like a business — whether it’s like the local restaurants that pop up and die like wildflowers, or megacorporations that sell broken products, whether financial, automotive, or otherwise.
If you read some elements of the press, it’s easy to think that healthcare.gov is the first time that a website failed. And it’s easy to forget that a large non-government website was failing, in surprisingly similar ways, at roughly the same time. I’m talking about the Common App site, the site high school seniors use to apply to most colleges in the US. There were problems with pasting in essays, problems with accepting payments, problems with the app mysteriously hanging for hours, and more.
The Drupal API turns a CMS into a true enterprise application
With its flexible API, Drupal integrates with 3rd party tools — a functionality that could revolutionize health care technology.
Contributing author: Ben Schluter
Drupal is well known as a Content Management System (CMS) — famously used by the White House and elsewhere. At the company where I work, Achieve Internet, we view Drupal as more than just a CMS — we see it as a powerful web application platform with capabilities to integrate multiple sources of information. Sporting a far-reaching and flexible API, Drupal can link together other platforms that provide APIs, such as enterprise productivity systems or electronic health records (EHRs), and essentially provide Drupal’s web pages as an interface to these systems on both a read and write basis. The growth of the platform and the community has put Drupal in a position to revolutionize the concept of a traditional CMS in one market sector after another, from the media and entertainment industries to education, travel, and government. Read more…
Next-generation Web apps with full stack JavaScript
Power scalable Web apps with 100% JavaScript
Since its introduction, JavaScript was often seen as a limited object-oriented language that had many “bad” parts. The situation today is almost the opposite.
In competition with Java, C#, and Ruby, JavaScript is developing one of the largest ecosystems for web applications today. Why, as it seems, is a language made for web browsers gaining traction for building next-generation web applications on the server-side too?
In fact, you can see another example of disruptive innovation at work. As Clayton Christensen explained in his innovation theory, affordability and access are important drivers behind technology shifts. While the LAMP stack and its peers with Ruby, Python, Java, and C# provide the foundations for many server-side web applications today, JavaScript ships natively with web browsers, which enables a much larger part of the digital population to experiment with web development. In addition to lower costs of infrastructure and easier installation, companies get access to a larger pool of web developers.
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