The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for reliable data on the number of COVID-19 tests performed in the United States, as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had stopped sharing this critical information. Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal, along with Erin Kissane, formed The COVID Tracking Project to manually gather and compile testing data from each US state and territory's public health department website. They built a resilient site using Jamstack architecture, Contentful, Algolia, and Netlify, which has become an invaluable resource for citizens, journalists, and even state governments seeking accurate COVID-19 data. The project's success was marked by unprecedented traffic and API requests, with the site scaling to handle millions of unique users and powering over 2 million API requests daily from around the world.