The story about how a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection: "It was like someone had written a Murphy's Law algorithm and deployed it at scale. (...) The team had elite and, for tech, senior talent -- by which I mean that most of them were in their 30s -- from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago's own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe *especially* these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. "I think the Republicans fucked up in the hubris department," Reed told me. "I know we had the best technology team I've ever worked with, but we didn't know if it would work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened." - Amira

"In fact, the day after the October 21 game day, Amazon services -- on which the whole campaign's tech presence was built -- went down. (...) Hurricane Sandy hit on another game day, October 29, threatening the campaign's whole East Coast infrastructure. (...) The nerds shook up an ossifying Democratic tech structure and the politicos taught the nerds a thing or two about stress, small-p politics, and the meaning of life. (...) The genius of the campaign was that it learned to stop sending poor performers. (...) "There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine and I know what is going to come out of it," Reed said. "In this, the control we all enjoyed about technology was gone." - Amira