In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I think everyone who has ever worked on a project that has gone off the rails should be keeping the developers spending their days, nights, and weekends trying to rescue healthcare.gov in mind.

There has been a lot of finger pointing and analysis and direct attacks against this project. A lot of this criticism has been levvied by politicians and pundits who most likely have never been involved in a large project of this type.

Not being involved myself I won't pretend to have any of the answers to how this project ended up how it did. I do think that the popular viewpoint that building this project with your team, your process, or your technology of choice would have made things go more smoothly is naive and ignores the dozens of layers of complexity that go into any project of this scale.

Here's hoping that the unfortunate souls that got themselves involved in this mess get a day off to have some turkey with their families. They have definitely earned it, but with their looming deadline I doubt they get much of a break.