This article in The Atlantic was one of the more interesting pieces I read about the 2012 campaign and election. A few excerpts:

“If you look like an asshole, you have to be really good.”

They didn’t have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours. 

With Twitter, one of the company’s former employees, Mark Trammell, helped build a tool that could specifically target individual users with direct messages. “We built an influence score for the people following the [Obama for America] accounts and then cross-referenced those for specific things we were trying to target, battleground states, that sort of stuff.”

Last but certainly not least, you have the digital team’s Quick Donate. It essentially brought the ease of Amazon’s one-click purchases to political donations. “It’s the absolute epitome of how you can make it easy for people to give money online,”

They learned what it was like to have — and work with people who had —  a higher purpose than building cool stuff.

They started to worry about the next Supreme Court Justices while they coded.