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<div><div class="plaintext"><p dir="auto">What you describe probably could be done approximately as fast as Dave says. But we are not talking simply about a system with an elegant web interface for the public and a static database on the back end. The compexity of the back end depends a lot on the requirements. Localities have to keep up to date about hours, capacities, etc. Presumably this system is required to: reject people signing up bogus names to scalp the appointments, check that second shots are taken, etc. There are databases currently handling all this, very competently in our county, but I bet you’ll find everything in the wild from spreadsheets to modern systems. It’s not that its hard to get data into the system, but the entropy out there is huge, so feeding data into the system from the existing systems could get really messy.</p>
<p dir="auto">The general principal is that a simple problem repeated in a thousand different variations is no longer a simple problem.</p>
<p dir="auto">--Barry</p>
<p dir="auto">On 13 Mar 2021, at 21:59, jon zingale wrote:</p>
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<i>I can see a lot more work needed that will never be seen from the public’s side of the system. The 50,000 sites will not be constant. Some new ones will come, and some will go. Hospitals, public health departments, independent as well as chain pharmacies have to feed information into the system. How do they pass that information? How do they prove they are not a hacker and have the authority to change hours, capacity, availability of vaccine, location, etc. Are there mechanisms for weeding out defunct and out-of-date vaccination sites? The problems getting up-to-date and accurate numbers for COVID tests, deaths, ICU usage, etc., demonstrate this is not trivial.
</i><br>"""<p>
Not trivial, but also tinker toys. Industry-level authentication of RESTful services is a pattern that many of us on this list ought to be able to implement while skimming Instagram or playing online go. A small team of Friammers and/or a few interested parties could have something up in a month that would be considerably better than healthcare.gov or the New Mexico Unemployment app. Some on this list are pretty bright and could write or implement <a href="https://galois.com/research-development/software-correctness/" target="_top" rel="nofollow" link="external">formal verification software</a> for proving the correctness of the code.<p>
It is so easy to point to software that doesn't do as advertised that it is easy to miss out on what the present state of the art actually is. The anecdotal cases are click-bait. But hey, I have spilled enough ink on this subject already. Yes, we <i>can</i> have nice things.
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