Mikey Dickerson walked into the DHHS wearing a rumpled T-shirt and cargo pants...
He wasn't the typical federal contractor. Dickerson was a standout Google engineer with a "fix it first" mentality.
And he was called in to save a $300 million government website.
The Department of Health and Human Services ("DHHS") began developing HealthCare.gov in late 2011 to support President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act ("ACA").
The ACA aimed to expand health care coverage... to make it more accessible and affordable for more Americans.
But by October 2013, HealthCare.gov was in shambles...
Only 3 out of 10 users could get on the site at all...
And even those lucky few were likely to get kicked off mid-enrollment.
On the surface, it looked like a basic web-traffic problem. The brand-new site had too many users and not enough server capacity.
HealthCare.gov was designed to handle up to 60,000 simultaneous users. But as many as 250,000 users tried logging on during its first week.
Once inside the system, Dickerson could see the real issue... HealthCare.gov had no central dashboard, so it couldn't log errors. Bugs were also stacking up faster than developers could clear them.
The White House was preparing for the worst... If things didn't improve quickly, Obama was ready to pull the plug on the entire program.
So Dickerson had to move fast. The first step was putting together a simple dashboard that tracked real-time site performance. Dickerson then implemented a database cache – a basic fix that should've been part of the original build.
For weeks, Dickerson and his team slept on couches and rotated shifts...
They cleared dozens of bugs and pushed live code at a blistering pace. Eventually, average page load times dropped from eight seconds to two.
It wasn't a perfect solution, but it salvaged the website... and the ACA's mission.
By November 30, HealthCare.gov was again serving tens of thousands of users at once.
Dickerson's approach became a blueprint for federal tech rollouts. And it covered much more than just code and caches...
It highlighted the importance of project implementation.
Dickerson knew how to deploy and optimize new technology within the DHHS's existing system...
That kind of implementation is what makes or breaks big government projects. And it brings us to the present day...
The federal government is on the verge of rolling out the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability ("JWCC") initiative within the Department of Defense.
This massive cloud-computing project will create a unified and secure cloud infrastructure that handles sensitive data and AI operations across defense and intelligence agencies.
These types of projects need implementation experts like Dickerson to prevent a HealthCare.gov-style implosion before it ever starts.
It's not just the JWCC, either. The government is handing out plenty of contracts that focus on cutting-edge cloud and AI systems.
The companies that specialize in these crucial fields are set for a huge windfall in 2026... as the next wave of tech modernization takes shape inside the federal government.
Regards,
Joel Litman
December 22, 2025
