Can we help elect the President?
We had one goal; help make Hillary Clinton the 45th President of the United States of America. You know how that ended. What you might not know about is the tireless work of a small team of technologists who dedicated themselves to the HFA campaign. You don’t know about that because that’s how we designed it. From the beginning, our mantra was, “don’t be the story.”
*Warning: Do not visit any thegroundwork.com domains. The owner of the domain let it lapse years ago and it was taken over by bad actors.
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Hats worn
Leadership, product, writing, design, front-end
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Code used
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Python
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Continuum
The Web
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Timeframe
2014-2017
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Status
Disbanded in 2018 and missed dearly.
Hillary for America
Our web services for collecting donations, email subscriptions, identity, and event creation were the foundation of the Hillary for America technology.
Along with our microservice APIs, our team was also instrumental in the initial Hillary for America website launch. In the days leading up to the April 12, 2015 launch we helped the HFA tech team and another web development vendor stand up a Wagtail CMS, implement designs, squash bugs, and make sure the the site could handle the massive traffic it was about to receive.
In the months after launch we continued our work with the growing HFA tech team. We played a key role in interviewing candidates and making recommendations for designer and engineer hires for HFA. We also continued daily work on the website.
Myself along with other members of the Groundwork helped complete the front-end engineering necessary for the HFA kickoff rally in New York City in early summer 2015.
Over 14,000 people RSVP’d for the launch rally using backend and frontend systems built by our team. This was only the beginning.
The Developer Center
This was one of my babies during my tenure. Our web services not only powered the Hillary for America tech, they were also available for non-profit organizations to build with. The Developer Center was the documentation portal for all users of The Groundwork services. Over the 3 years I worked at The Groundwork, I got have a lot of fun designing and building this website.
Blocks
The Groundwork Blocks were highly configurable drop-in widgets for collecting
payments and email subscriptions. We built them to allow our customers
a way to quickly implement donation collections and email subscriptions
with little to no engineering resources. With a single div
and a script tag, customers had full access to our APIs.
The Humans
While I never held the official title, I got to act as a de facto Lead of the Frontend Team at The Groundwork. For a time it was the largest team at seven excellent humans. I see leadership roles as a service position. My primary role during that time was to help make sure each member of the team had everything they needed to do great work. I didn’t always succeed. I made mistakes daily. But I got the opportunity to try, so I did every day.
My teammates were the best group of humans I’ve ever worked with. I’m proud to still be able to count them as friends years after it all ended.
Note: What I have here is a sliver of the work we did. One day I'll make a static archive of as much of the front-end that we built as possible. Because it was just too good to not be online to share.
