Sunlight Labs

Building Poligraft

I'm happy to announce the newest project from Sunlight Labs, Poligraft. A utility built on top of Transparency Data, Poligraft takes in a block of text, parses it for entities like politicians and corporations, and returns a result set representing the political influence contained in that text. I won't dwell on the features -- read Ellen Miller's announcement blog post and the about page for more information. What I want to talk about instead is the development process.

Labs Olympics: Automate your life with geocron

Last month for the two-day internal app competition we had at Sunlight Labs, Jeremy, Kaitlin, and I built geocron. Jeremy had a specific problem that just needed to be solved. When reaching his Red line Metro station during the commute home, he'd have to physically take out his iPhone and send a text message to his wife, asking to be picked up. Surely, such actions can and should be automated, and that's where geocron comes in. By combining the Google Latitude API with old-fashioned cron jobs, we've created a utility that can send automated email, SMS, or webhook payloads depending on the time of day and the place you're located.

How We Use MongoDB at Sunlight

Last week, David and I attended MongoNYC, a one-day conference focused on MongoDB. We like Mongo here at Sunlight. We like it a lot.

Working with Mongo, it's become clear that it's a more natural way to store data. We primarily use Python and Ruby, and because Mongo allows us to think in JSON, everything tends to just click. JSON documents are close enough to objects in Python and Ruby that mapping between application and database becomes almost effortless. Mongo has really shined in two specific use cases: as a datastore for a resource oriented web service, and as a datastore for results from scraping a web site.