Will this eventually be posted on youtube or somewhere we can watch?

oh God please no - why would you even put this out there, you know someone is going to pick it up!

any advice for starting a meetup? There are none close to me to go to for programming and software development

My kids aren't old enough for this embarrassment yet, but I am looking forward to blaring my music and yelling "I LOVE YOU" just like you did

Because it will be around for multiple decades it (almost above all) needs to be easily understandable - that being, not only good documentation but also code that is straightforward to read even at the expense of some performance(calls should still be under a couple hundred milliseconds).

Therefore I would argue that as much as possible upfront care should be taken when designing any federal software system to be flexible for future changes (due to its long life). We need to use well known patterns and tools where their failure points and weaknesses are known and can be accounted for

With all this (and many more things I haven’t even touched upon) it makes sense then why we have 40+ year old systems running agencies. In short - there are very few if any incentives to quickly change software systems.

It should mostly be “boring”, because would you like to be dealing with a system that uses marklogic xml magic for the next 20 years? That’s assuming of course you can even find anyone to still work on that system then.

Agencies do not see technology (specifically software development) as a central core by which everything is enabled, but rather as a cost center to be minimized and outsourced.