New Relic Blog

> Also, would like to hear your thoughts on building a new system vs building on top of the many available open source medical systems.

Thanks for asking. I'm sorry in advance that this reply is lengthy. I'll try to be succinct.

Starting HospitalRun in 2014 was a very intentional, deeply-considered decision on our part, made after reviewing a wide spectrum of the available open source and commercial solutions for our network of developing world charitable hospitals at CURE International.

We simply couldn't find a solution that we felt could both meet our requirements and be successfully deployed across our network. So without saying anything for or against other health system projects from the past or present, I'll say that the following were the driving factors for the decision to build HospitalRun.

1) Taking usability very seriously. For us, that doesn't just mean UX and clinical usability or even just administrative usability (since there's a lot more than just the doctors we're trying to serve). It also means easy to setup, easy to administer, and (and we're definitely not there yet) easy to contribute code. A developer is already doing A TON for a project like this by absorbing a totally unfamiliar set of business requirements. We want to make the experience of contributing to HospitalRun delightful. Like I said, that's aspirational - not reality yet... but that's part of what we think "1.0" looks like.

2) Architecture choices: we're committed to modern, cloud…

Creator of ack here.

The three biggest reasons to use grepalikes is not necessarily the time to execute the search, but

1) The reduced amount of typing. It's much faster to type "ack foo --ruby" than it is to type "find . -name '* .rb' | xargs grep foo"

2) Better filetype matching, because ack and ag check things beyond just file extensions. ack's --ruby flag checks for *.rb and Rakefile and "ruby" appearing in the shebang line, for example.

3) More features that grep doesn't include, like better highlighting and grouping, or full Perl regular expressions (in ack) and a ton of other features.

Here's a command line to find all the header files in your C source. It takes advantage of the ability to use Perl's regular expressions to specify output:

ack --cc '#include <(.+?)>' -H --output='$1' | sort -u

Here's an article I wrote a while ago on comparing the features of ack and ag. https://blog.newrelic.com/2015/01/28/grep-ack-ag/

Even though I created ack, I don't care which tool you use, so long as it suits your needs and makes you happy, but if all you're using your grep/ack/ag for is "grep -R function_name ." then you're only scratching the surface of what the tools can do for you.

Conceptually, I think everyone at the U.S. Digital Service would be comfortable with working on a remote team. Many of us have done it, and since we're scattered across agencies, the group itself operates in a fairly distributed fashion on a day-to-day basis.

Remote work does work at 18F, where they are often shipping projects that are self-contained and executed in-house. It's also a lot easier to build a remote-friendly culture if you start on day one, which 18F did. It's really just about the nature of the work we do, embedded on these agency projects, that necessitates being in D.C. The role of USDS HQ is simply different -- we're often grafted onto existing 'culture' elsewhere (I work on a floor with more than a hundred of product and engineering folks who were here years before we arrived), and are then tasked with helping to advise/fix/transform those projects as quickly and effectively as possible. (I'd also read https://blog.newrelic.com/2014/03/26/depth-look-team-saved-healthcare-gov/, which was a precursor effort.)

If you're interested in serving in the U.S. Digital Service but are in a position to be only able to work remotely, 18F is a pretty great option.

If anyone wants to help fix the problem, I suggest the newly formed USDS. There are a lot of ex-Google people involved trying to help clean up and secure IT infrastructure in the Government. I spoke with someone who did a short stint with them and it sounds like they're actually being empowered to fix things.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service/story

Mike Dickerson gave a really good in-depth talk at Google about his work cleaning up the healthcare.gov project. The Time article lacks many of the technical details but is still pretty good.
Sorry, all I can find is a link to the PDF.
https://blog.newrelic.com/wp-content/uploads/80893.pdf

From talking to people who've worked in the USDS, the problem doesn't appear to be lack of capable people, or lack of funds. The problem seems to be in the structure of how projects are bid and executed. The bad news is the problem is universal. The good news it's fixable ... it's just going to take a lot of work by a lot of smart and determined people.

Sign up and go fix it.

Related, I was recently in the depths of understanding Kafka from the consumer side, specifically a very busy topic with many partitions. Some blog posts I enjoyed:

1. https://blog.cloudera.com/scalability-of-kafka-messaging-using-consumer-groups/

2. http://www.vinsguru.com/kafka-scaling-consumers-out-for-a-consumer-group/

3. https://medium.com/@jhansireddy007/how-to-parallelise-kafka-consumers-59c8b0bbc37a

4. https://medium.com/@durgaswaroop/a-practical-introduction-to-kafka-storage-internals-d5b544f6925f

5. https://blog.newrelic.com/engineering/effective-strategies-kafka-topic-partitioning/

And a fun one from Microsoft:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/blog/processing-trillions-of-events-per-day-with-apache-kafka-on-azure/

"The time for Dockers and containers isn't quite today, but it's very close."

Hmmm ... tell that to AirBnb (http://nerds.airbnb.com/future-app-deployment/), New Relic (https://blog.newrelic.com/2014/08/12/docker-centurion/ ) and Spotify (https://blog.docker.com/2014/06/dockercon-video-docket-at-spotify-by-rohan-singh/)

It is a young technology, but moving quickly. Just 10 years ago, YouTube wasn't owned by Google yet and we didn't have the first iPhone.

Hell, 17 years ago VMware (arguably the king in the virtual machine software market) was founded. If it was a kid, it wouldn't have graduated from high school yet!