VIVirenM·Dec 4, 2023
In 2016, my second year at university, I was betting on the US elections. I'd collated multiple sources (FiveThirtyEight and a bunch of publications) to calculate each states swing and decided it would be a democratic sweep.
Unfortunately, I ended up losing a good portion of my savings I'd made developing websites over the years. I choose to take the night off to figure out how the make the best out of this situation, which ended up turning into TrumpTracker.
TrumpTracker [1] followed Donald Trump's Electoral Promises and kept the previous president-elect accountable for all actions and promises he made prior to his commencement. I deliberately open sourced [2] the project so that everyone could equally vote on whether a promise was comprised via GitHub issues. There was also a published iOS app for a bit.
Since I'd completed the project
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in 12 hours post election results it got picked up by the news cycle.
I enjoyed working on something at scale which collaborated with engineers, data scientists, and economists from all around the world, especially when the codebase was forked and used in other countries for their respective electives.
This project paved the way for a number of projects, as well as my current job, and also helped in securing my eventual O1.
[1] https://trumptracker.github.io/
[2] https://github.com/TrumpTracker/trumptracker.github.io