I built a Datasette app to view the candidates for the Irish General Election in 2024. I wanted to be able to see on a broader scale how many candidates each party was running, and in which constituencies. The project involved quite a lot of data management, as data from the various party websites, Wikipedia, and the election commissioner websites was often misaligned - even candidate names in some cases.
I continue to be a big fan of Ireland's voting system, where proportional representation is ensured by rank choice voting. It has some fun implications - including that if there's a candidate in your consituency you absolutely do not want, it's better to rank them last than to not rank them at all. You can also always vote your conscience, even when it aligns with a candidate with no chance in the election, and your vote will still be counted for the candidate you rank highest who is elected.
You can read more about the voting system (though when I wanted to implement a counting simulator, I found that specific details around the counting were somewhat lacking) on the website of An Coimisiún Toghcháin (The Electoral Commission).
I have used Datasette for a number of projects. When combined with the data focused shell nushell, which understands http requests, parsing, filtering, processing, and saving directly to sqlite, it makes me feel like I'm living in the future of software development as described in the final chapter of Gregory Brown's 2016 book Programming Beyond Practices. The chapter presents a vision of programming with visual language, open data, the metaverse, an even an AI assistant. It's eye-opening reading in 2025, when AI assistants are marketed to us constantly and we've lost all of the hopes and expectations for their efficacy that we had in 2016.
Have a look at what I built here.