This project describes some of my work on The Washington Post's coverage of the 2020 General Elections
Background
This project formed the backbone of the Washington Post's 2020 General Election coverage, including party primaries, for arguably one of the most consquential election of our lifetimes. I joined the News Engineering team in May 2020, and with the covid-19 pandemic still raging it was clear that the pandemic would affect not only the electoral process but also our election coverage. The team also brainstormed various ways which might make our pages load and update faster.
Key Goals
- Create robust re-usable React components that could be deployed on our election pages as well as on the homepage.
- Communicate uncertainty for the votes remaining model through various graphics
- Create and maintain a robust pipeline, from ingestion of third-party vendor data to a blazing fast static build of all pages
My role
Most of my tasks for this project resided within the Next based app that consumes incoming election results data and generates static builds of all election pages. I helped create React components such as the Balance of Power, and contributed towards the maintainence of other existing components in the app. Ensuring that the results displayed to millions of readers was non-negotiable for us so naturally I also wrote tests for visual components and the underlying logic, with robust testing for all edge cases. In addition to my contributions to the frontend I also touched parts of the backend data pipeline, helping patch bits and pieces.
