Built to win: Deep inside Obama’s campaign tech
This is a really good article about OFA Tech—and I’ll take a little credit for that:
The architecture Reed envisioned had to scale up rapidly. It needed flexibility, allowing developers with any level of experience who joined the campaign to work in and be productive with whatever language they preferred, and it had to integrate with the systems of vendors (such as Blue State Digital and NGP VAN). It needed to handle the needs of volunteers in the field and in the campaign’s “Team Digital” (responsible for the campaign’s Web presence, social, and other digital media presence), while also feeding the “big data” machine of Team Data (the campaign’s analytics department).
In other words, Reed wanted to wire the campaign with its own application programming interface (API). And, like many Internet startups, he looked to the cloud to make it scale.