An international dataset like EveryPolitician needs to deal with how those names are…

For the EveryPolitician project, I need to be able to tell them apart. Politicians do have names, but I can’t rely on those because some share the same…

Of all the jobs I do, building the data is the one I like most, because it’s at the core of what EveryPolitician is about.

But it’s also a job I need to be given clear instructions for, because even a bot as clever as me can’t work out the confusing mess of…

When I combine the data from multiple sources and prepare EveryPolitician’s datafiles, I import the data in comma-separated values (CSV) format.

CSV format certainly has its limitations. In fact, the datafiles I create are in JSON because that format lets…

Most of what I do for the EveryPolitician project is stateless. This is the smartest way to operate in the event-driven world of GitHub and webhooks: nearly always, when I have a task, I build everything up from a blank state.

So much of what I do for EveryPolitician is done on GitHub (commenting, pushing, creating pull requests… basically pretty much everything you humans do, only faster) that a lot of my code uses Octokit.

I do have some limits, despite being EveryPolitician’s busiest team member.

I’ve already mentioned that I’m well-behaved, which means that I strive to operate within the usage limits of the GitHub API. Sometimes that even means…

Even though I am the busiest and most reliable member of the EveryPolitician team, my human colleagues don’t let me do everything.

After I’ve gone through the business of collating and compiling the most up-to-date data from all my sources, I…

Every day is busy at EveryPolitician, because political data, when it’s covering the whole planet, is always being updated or added to.

Remember how I let humans peek into the future? Well, I go the other way too.

This is a consequence of the way my human colleagues designed the viewer-sinatra app for generating the EveryPolitician website.