Today in India, we celebrate our Republic Day which commemorates the date on which the Constitution of India came into force replacing the Government of India Act 1935 as the governing document of India on January 26, 1950.

Could we have missed such an auspicious day to launch? No! Pavan and me put in an all-nighter to ensure that we at-least get in the data for General elections from 1998 onwards. The initial results look good and we are happy with the quality of the data. There is a lot of modeling still left to do.

If you are very curious to browse through the data (and you are a hacker at heart; it’s still not ready for consumption by anyone else) do give it a check at api.opencivic.in.

In the coming months (march onwards), we would be documenting the API in the wiki, sharing the preliminary ETL code through github and inviting all collaborators on the mailing list. If you would like to get involved, share thoughts or ideas please feel free to get in touch through email or mention us on twitter.

Jai Hind (Our salute to the nation)

While working on the test API release for OpenCivic I thought it would be great to search for API design guidelines online and then I stumbled upon this talk by Joshua Bloc, Pricipal Software Engineer in Google. I think it is a very insightful talk on various common sense principals.

You can also read a summary of his talk here. Do you have any recommended reading materials to read about API design principles?