Courtesy of The Atlantic. A fascinating article about President Obama's tech team geniuses.
http://www.theatlantic.com/...
While much has been written about how Mitt Romney's super-secret hi-tech election day database crashed and burned early in the day on November 6th, not much ink has been spilled detailing the flawless performance of President Obama's data platform, code named "Narwhal".
It was game day and everything was going wrong...
Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else.
Which was good, because this was a worst-case mockup performed three weeks before the election.
Chief technology officer, Harper Reed:
"We worked through every possible disaster situation," Reed said. "We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had built."
Indeed, the team even factored in Hurricane Sandy, just prior to Election Day:
"We created a hot backup of all our applications to US-west in preparation for US-east to go down hard," Reed said.
The well-founded belief amongst Obama's tech team:
Narwhal unified what Obama for America knew about voters, canvassers, event-goers, and phone-bankers, and it did it in real time. From the descriptions of the Romney camp's software that were available then and now, Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal.
Please read the whole article; it's extremely enjoyable.