Database We Can Believe In: Stories from the Front Lines (and Server Rooms) of Barack Obama's Online Presidential Campaign

Chuck Hagenbuch leads the software infrastructure team at Blue State Digital, building the core of the company’s tools and working with new technologies. He brings years of experience writing web applications and software libraries to the job of growing the company’s software to new uses and broader scale.

Prior to joining Blue State Digital, Chuck worked for Zend Technologies, providing professional services to many prominent companies, including Google, PayPal, and Portugal Telecom. He founded the open source Horde Project in 1998 and remains active leading its development.

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Leigh Heyman is the Director of Information Systems for Blue State Digital, where he leads the team that manages all aspects of the company’s server, network and database infrastructure.

For a time Leigh was Blue State Digital’s only system administrator, and he played an key role in building the hosting infrastructure behind MyBO Barack Obama’s online fundraising, outreach and social networking website during the 2008 presidential campaign. His expertise covers most aspects of UNIX system management. He has more than ten years of professional experience—ranging from technical support, database administration, infrastructure design and network security.

Prior to joining Blue State Digital, Leigh was a system administrator at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Outside of work Leigh is a former U.S. National Rowing Team membe Prior to joining Blue State Digital, Leigh was a system administrator at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

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Steve was the Site Reliability Engineering Lead for a large MySQL installation at Google from 2005-2008. Late in 2008, he volunteered at Obama For America helping with big-data analytics. Upon returning to Google, he’s been working with networks. Steve has more than 15 years experience as a UNIX and OpenSource generalist from Purdue University, Progeny Linux Systems, FedEx, and Google.

Once a game programmer, then a Unix admin for Pomona College, since 2006 Mikey has worked in the Site Reliability department at Google, where he manages one of the largest MySQL deployments in the world.

Ian has worked in the computing industry for over ten years at telecom giants and Internet startups. He founded and implemented an anti-spam blackhole list using MySQL that grew to be the most-queried on the Internet. Eventually, the pull of Google brought him to California, where he now works doing administration and development around Google’s MySQL deployment.

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