US Census API Application

This is a lightweight Flask applicaiton that queries the US Census API, cleans the data, and renders an interactive Folium map with the output.

Running the App

• This app is Dockerized and can be run simply with docker compose up --build
• The Flask app, Redis server, and RQ worker run in the same container
• Mapping requests are handled asynchronously so that users don't experience long wait times in the browser

Usage Notes

• Select your state and API request type on the landing page

• A choropleth map is rendered and saved asynchronously; see all requests stored on the results page

• You can click on the View anchor for each request to see a customized rendering of the map

Sticking Points

• This app can be much more abstract ... in its current form it would be hard to incorporate more Census API request types easily

• Standardizing the API responses was a bit laborious, as different years have different variable names that must be standardized before computation

• This project required me to research the data types that do (and don't!) work well with the Folium library ... this required extra standardizing and a bit of trial and error