131–140 of 399 posts
Shadow has got to be the worst name for a company associated with politics, unless you want to rub it in everyone's face
Why Shadow?
When a light is shining, Shadows are a constant companion. We see ourselves as building a long-term, side-by-side “Shadow” of tech infrastructure to the Democratic Party and the progressive community at large.
I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…
I don't know whether I heard correctly or if the number was accurate, but I heard someone throw out $60k as the amount paid for the app development this morning on the radio. That sounds like a lot of money to a lay-person, but assuming $100/hr, which seems like at least a reasonable ballpark rate, that breaks down to 600 man-hours, or 15 man-weeks. That is a very tight deadline to turn out a critical app like this.…
You only had 1000 precincts, all you had to deal with is 1000 calls - and if one of them went wrong, you'll let that person know through some kind of reviewing mechanism. I understand that $60K is nothing but this kind of failure is absurd.
I think the author's take on this is a bit heavy with hyperbole, but there's no doubt Iowa was a mess last night. My son was there working as volunteer, and so was his ex-girlfriend, who's still a close family friend. I was chatting with them both throughout the evening and into the wee hours this morning. They worked different locations in the Des Moines metro area and the results they reported to me were pretty clo…
Any database should work just fine for this application. 1678 precincts. 11 candidates. 2 rounds. That's 37 thousand records to fully represent everything.
Checked their LinkedIn and the employees who work there. The founder is non-technical and there are two developers: one who is a "back-end intern" and the other is a front-end developer (both are fresh from bootcamps). ...Yikes.
CEO, COO, CTO...
Here's the thing I don't understand about them, I thought startups were averse to this? Am I wrong about startups or am I wrong about them being a startup?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's basically a "KISS" issue. The data being submitted is so simple that using an SQL db adds a layer of unnecessary complexity. So did their decisions for authentication, which appears to be where things got stuck.
KISS but you suggest no sql ? Really ? Just use postgres
I think the author's take on this is a bit heavy with hyperbole, but there's no doubt Iowa was a mess last night. My son was there working as volunteer, and so was his ex-girlfriend, who's still a close family friend. I was chatting with them both throughout the evening and into the wee hours this morning. They worked different locations in the Des Moines metro area and the results they reported to me were pretty clo…
I'm not sure that proposing alternate solutions is so enlightening. Even so, they could have just had the person in charge of each location post the results to twitter. Then they wouldn't have had to do any tabulation, because the public would have done the tabulation for them...
The owners and staffers at Shadow INC have a severe conflict of interest. The company is loaded with former Clinton staffers and the CEO sent a tweet in support of Buttigeig, who recently paid tens of thousands to the company. Other suspicious dealings are a premature victory announcement by Buttigeig's campaign and a leak of a picture of paper tallies which included a PIN allegedly used to login to the tally app. Lo…
This doesn't necessarily mean there is a huge conspiracy, but the optics -and the reality- of the party machine functioning properly is terrible, and the choice is between incompetence or malfeasance. Either way, they shot themselves in the foot, and it's not a good look.
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Should a company's employees/CEO have to be apolitical? I'd be surprised if there is such a company where none of its employees are involved in politics in any way. Especially if its a company whose sole purpose is developing software for a political party.
It is not a controversial statement to say that an election shouldn't be run with closed software made by a private company with financial, personal, and professional ties to one of the candidates. If something like this happened elsewhere in the world the US would use it as pretext for intervention.
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Should a company's employees/CEO have to be apolitical? I'd be surprised if there is such a company where none of its employees are involved in politics in any way. Especially if its a company whose sole purpose is developing software for a political party.
No, but until recently it was professional to keep your politics private and, more importantly, when there are inconsistencies disproportionately favoring an otherwise less popular candidate, public support from employees and especially the CEO, in conjunction with a money trail, these personal indicators of bias become relevant for justification of suspicion.
There doesn’t seem to be any indication this was anything but a regular screwup. Throwing around suggestions of a vague conspiracy looks unwarranted.
You’re suggesting that to avoid suspicion companies providing services to political campaigns must be apolitical and to have never previously provided services to a candidate in the race or any previous opponent of a candidate in the race. How could that even be possible?
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Any database should work just fine for this application. 1678 precincts. 11 candidates. 2 rounds. That's 37 thousand records to fully represent everything.
Hell you could probably get away with SQLite on a single backend service.