Scaling For The White House: Wedgies Powers The State of The Union Polling

Scaling For The White House: Wedgies Powers The State of The Union Polling

There’s an old saying “Opportunity knocks but once.” Nowadays, opportunity ditched the whole knocking thing and prefers to send emails via a contact form field on your website. At least, that was the case for Porter Haney and Jimmy Jacobson of Wedgies, a real-time social polling platform.

When The White House needed a polling platform for the 44th State of the Union Address, they reached out to Wedgies. The White House made their needs clear. Wedgies would have to handle the following with 30 days to launch:

• 150,000 concurrent users
• Handle 120,000 API requests per minute

This was a sizable, but not impossible undertaking for the Wedgies crew. But in the limited window of time they had, Wedgies shipped a new feature for The White House and scaled to meet traffic demands that they had never seen before.

Wedgies uses Twilio SMS to allow anyone and everyone to respond to polls via text. You can learn more about Wedgies here and watch Jimmy Jacobson’s talk from Signal “Scaling Wedgies” below.