Post by Sarah Starr

Just heard that one of the apps I built and deployed while on a data team in Iraq is being retired today. Hard not to reflect a bit…it was built by just two Army reservists over a few weeks, yet went on to have outsized impact across our task force and the broader organization for years to come. The app replaced a notoriously painful spreadsheet process and became a core system for intelligence teams, eventually supporting hundreds if not thousands of users every day. Sure it’s not the scale of industry, but it solved a unique mission problem and was custom-engineered to do so. Its success came down to acknowledging skilled data talent in uniform, putting them far forward with the problems, empowering them to tightly iterate directly with the end-user SMEs, and having a legit cloud platform where we could build and deploy at the speed of mission. No doubt its successor will be better than the last. I'm proud to see how something so scrappy and mission-driven could endure for five years, proving that small, empowered teams can drive big change when they’re close to the problems and trusted to move fast and (occasionally) break things. Jason Yee Ryan M. Jesse Cooper Matt Benigni, PhD Joe C. Jay Long Molly Solsbury Dominique Reyes