There sure was plenty of tech involved in Obama’s election campaign—including millions of virtual elections which were used to predict the future—but until now the team behind it has gone uncelebrated.
https://gizmodo.com/obamas-campaign-ran-millions-of-virtual-elections-to-pr-5958522
Fortunately, Ars Technica has a wonderful feature about Obama’s secret weapon: Team Tech. To whet your appetite:
The reelection of Barack Obama was won by people, not by software. But [the]… edge was provided by the work of a group of people unique in the history of presidential politics: Team Tech, a dedicated internal team of technology professionals who operated like an Internet startup, leveraging a combination of open source software, Web services, and cloud computing power.
They faced a weighty task—as one tweet, from Scott VanDenPlas, the head of the Obama’s DevOps group, put it “4Gb/s, 10k requests per second, 2,000 nodes, 3 datacenters, 180TB and 8.5 billion requests. Design, deploy, dismantle in 583 days to elect the President”—but it didn’t phase them.
Instead, they achieved the seemingly impossible: a behemoth of computational grunt that suffered just 30 minutes of downtime during the entire election campaign. Of course, tech didn’t win the presidentship—but it went a long way in helping. You should read the whole report over at Ars Technica. It’s inspirational stuff. [Ars Technica]
Image by Pete Souza under Creative Commons license
