
What the Obama IT team teaches us about polyglot programming - luc_perkins
http://blog.appfog.com/what-the-obama-it-team-teaches-us-about-polyglot-programming/
======
confluence
_> 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. #madops – Scott VanDenPlas, Obama for America IT team_

That's impressive. Glad that tech is on the Democratic side.

But then again change, liberalism, progress, technology and innovation are all
leftist tenets - so it isn't so surprising.

Here's hoping to another tech assisted Republican defeat in 2016. May the
morons stay out of power - least they screw us all once again.

------
theevocater
I think that what they accomplished is amazing, but remember that their goals
were very different than your typical business. Their goals were to create
something in a short amount of time with a really random group of people given
a fairly short lifetime. The individual projects will live on, but the whole
thing was shut down at the end of the campaign.

A business is about sustainability. You are creating things that you will be
maintaining and using for (hopefully) years to come. You get to be picky about
who you are hiring. In that given, its not unusual that you want all of your
employees to be able to work on various parts of the stack as focus changes or
what not.

This isn't to discount the value in polyglot groups. Its almost an
inevitability at this point. While totally possible that you could have
entirely js stack in node, more likely you'll have ruby (or something) and
javascript and maybe objc for iphone and java for android and maybe .Net for
windows or more objc on osx or whatever.

~~~
saraid216
> In that given, its not unusual that you want all of your employees to be
> able to work on various parts of the stack as focus changes or what not.

Isn't it? I'm a frontend dev. While I'm _capable_ of digging into the backend
and mucking around, it's not a typical part of my job. There are backend devs
who I can talk to, who are writing Scala or Java rather than Javascript or
Ruby, who can deal with problems faster and better than I could.

Changes of focus like what you describe seem to be typical of far more nascent
companies. In that sense, Reed's team was like a startup: everyone had to be
ultra-capable because they had to pick up _anyone's_ slack at any time, just
like a CEO of a ten-man group sometimes has to clean the kitchen or code a
component that no one else has time to.

~~~
oasisbob
_In that sense, Reed's team was like a startup: everyone had to be ultra-
capable because they had to pick up anyone's slack at any time_

It's important to note that in this sense, "polyglot" refers to the collective
group -- ie, the Obama campaign had numerous talented people with a huge
variety of skills in-house -- vs the individual sense of the word.

Not to say that there weren't incredibly talented generalists, but when you
have a team of this size (dozens of designers and front-end developers,
engineers focused on the back-end APIs, a team dedicated to data integration,
a handful of dedicated ops and DBAs) the ability of individuals to specialize
in an area could be a strength.

------
ckluis
Like it or not, the democratic party owns technology compared to republicans
today.

~~~
chernevik
It seems more likely that this was an Obama campaign advantage, rather than a
Democratic party advantage.

The translation over isn't obvious. From what I've heard their internal
organization was pretty fluid. That kind of thing depends on the quality of
people involved, their commonality of purpose, and the organizational culture.
You can't box that and roll it over to party HQ.

That said, Democrats do seem more likely to attract and motivate the kind of
people you'd need for this. That's a pretty important head start.

~~~
luc_perkins
I agree pretty strongly. I read, for example, that the Obama campaign expanded
the Democratic Party's voter database by something like a factor of 10.

~~~
eli
But the database (and accompanying tech platform) then gets cycled back into
the hands of state and local parties, where it can be incredibly useful.

