A few weeks ago, I left NGP VAN. After eight and a half years working at the leading technology provider for Democratic candidates and allied groups, I finally decided to move on to another gig. I’m now a software architect working at Wayfair.

Working at NGP VAN was a wonderful experience in a lot of different ways, and I think back on my time there fondly. While I’m very much enjoying my new job, it’s been something of a bittersweet transition. The people I met at NGP VAN, including my coworkers, many of our clients, and quite a few integration partners, were terrific and it was a lot of fun to work with them. The work itself was an enjoyable and thrilling challenge: we made a vast trove of data available across the breadth and depth of the progressive movement, and in doing so made a lot of exciting victories possible.

A case in point was PDF turf packets, one of my first projects. A “turf packet” is just a list of people, usually voters, which a campaign wants to reach. Though it’s a practice on the decline these days, for quite some time these packets were printed on paper and handed to volunteers, who would then make phone calls or visit voters door-to-door. When I joined the company in mid-2010, organizers had to create their turf packets manually, one-at-a-time, going through our interface to prepare a packet, and then clicking “Print” on their browser. In addition to being a very time-consuming process, it was also error-prone, due to printer quirks, local browser settings, and any number of other factors. In September 2010, my boss and I started picking through the iText Sharp documentation, noodling around with the Google Maps API, and reverse-engineering the Mercator projection (which is about as fun as it sounds). By early October we were able to release a quick-and-dirty feature which allowed field organizers to turn their turf packets into PDFs, and to do so in batch. The feature was an instant hit. By my own estimates, we saved field organizers across the country over 8,000 hours of time - over the course of a single month of the 2010 cycle!

That kind of direct instant gratification was quite rare, comparatively speaking - usually the wins were more modest and involved a larger group of people. But it was a real joy to know that every day, I was doing something, however incremental, to make the progressive movement stronger, more efficient, and more nimble. Moreover, I was using my own skills as best as I possibly could. For one reason or another, I’ve been lucky enough to acquire a certain set of engineering talents, joined to a certain kind of progressive worldview - and I found myself in a job which allowed me to use the former in service of the latter. It’s remarkably gratifying to be so well-suited to one’s work, and I count myself very fortunate to have spent this chunk of my career as I did.

Now that I’m moving on to an entirely new industry, I find myself stepping back a little bit, and thinking more broadly about the work that I and my colleagues did over this past near-decade. When I joined NGP VAN, it was quite rare to be able to put engineering talents in service of a political ideology. I know because I looked for such jobs, quite a few times, in the mid-2000s. There were a few things here and there - website developer for an advocacy group, database manager for a well-meaning non-profit, that sort of thing. But the opportunities were few and far between.

These days it’s quite a different story: there is an entire cluster of companies, non-profit groups, and other entities looking to use engineering skills in pursuit of some kind of social justice mission, and presidential election cycles only magnify the demand. In large part, that is part of the digitization taking every industry by storm - software is eating the world, and in some cases attempting to make it more just, as well.

In another way, it’s something of a messianic trend. There’s no shortage of engineers jumping into the fray because they think they can help transform politics altogether. Progressive Coders Network is quite explicit about this approach, and I think it’s largely true of other groups within the Digital Resistance. It’s an idea I recognize well, because that was precisely what I wanted to do with my career, and what I hope I achieved in some measure. Intuitively, it’s like applying the idea of disruptive technology to politics: can a bit of savvy engineering change the political landscape dramatically, as it’s done in industries like transportation and hospitality?

That’s the question I’ve been thinking about over the past couple of months, and I hope to have more to say about it in the near future. For now, I wish my friends in the progressive technology industry well - there are certainly some interesting times ahead!