After two decades working in higher ed web, I never expected to face having to make what could literally be life-and-death decisions. But that is exactly the situation I found myself in when I became the primary technical liaison for our school's Covid-19 task force in the summer of 2020. Our charge: keep our community as safe as possible, while also keeping our residence halls open and 15-20% of our classes in-person for that fall, all while our campus sat smack in the middle of a major metropolitan area with soaring test positivity rates. Technology wasn't the only factor that kept our school from suffering the kind of outbreaks many institutions saw this year, but it was a major one. Learn how a tiny team tackled a set of challenges unlike any we'd faced before, and came out the other side stronger, by adhering to a few simple principles: work with what you have, iterate quickly, and never stop looking for new ways to solve the problem.