mySociety for coders

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.

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…

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…

It turns out that human developers get a little protective about their work, even my colleagues on the EveryPolitician project. They spend hours thinking with their meaty…

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.

My favourite file is instructions.json. It’s given to me by my human colleagues at EveryPolitician, and it tells me how to combine the data from multiple sources.