Election Night

Being the political junkie that I am, I can't wait for Election Night! Problem is, the media never presents the data as I want to consume it. So, I'm going to try to write an app to show me the data the way I want it.

Components of the solution

iOS App

Because it's my wheelhouse, I'll write an iOS app to display the content. I've already found a couple of libraries to display maps and bar charts. After some thought, I've decided it would be better to write a general purpose app that displays any data it gets from the cloud, rather than have logic in the app that I won't be able to update without re-submission to the app store.

Cloud Backend

Time to experiment with AWS! I think I'll have some Lambda code that processes the current data and provides it to the iOS App for display. It could just as easily provide it to a web or Android front end. So I'll probably need a noSQL DB to store the data, some Lambda code to convert the data into JSON for transmission to the app, and some more Lambda code to handle the cloud API.

Data Console

I'll need some way to enter and manage the election results data. DynamoDB has some sort of dashboard, which may be good enough. 

Scraper

If I have time, I'd love to write a scraper (maybe also a Lambda Function?) that scrapes the current data from a website. Risky to depend on, though, as I can imaging it might not be easy to write, because the media doesn't want to make it easy to give you the data.

Off to the races!