The latest articles on DEV Community by Alvaro Sacasa (@alvaro_sacasa_fcc0f11d60d). https://dev.to/alvaro_sacasa_fcc0f11d60d https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3684996%2F640577b5-27e8-4dfb-8690-b3b4b95c801c.jpg https://dev.to/alvaro_sacasa_fcc0f11d60d en Alvaro Sacasa Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:11:38 +0000 https://dev.to/alvaro_sacasa_fcc0f11d60d/i-built-a-tool-to-track-us-political-donations-and-won-an-award-for-it-14k3 https://dev.to/alvaro_sacasa_fcc0f11d60d/i-built-a-tool-to-track-us-political-donations-and-won-an-award-for-it-14k3 <p>The Problem with "Public" Data</p> <p>We all know that government data is technically "public," but that doesn't mean it's accessible. If you've ever tried to pull large datasets from government portals, you know the pain: antiquated UIs, weird CSV exports, and complex pagination.</p> <p>I wanted to solve this for US Campaign Finance data. Journalists and researchers need to see who is funding whom, but they often spend more time cleaning data than analyzing it.</p> <p><strong>The Solution: Wrapping the OpenFEC API</strong></p> <p>We built the FEC Campaign Finance Scraper, an Apify Actor that wraps the official OpenFEC API to make this data consumable at scale.</p> <p>Instead of writing custom scripts for every query, developers and researchers can now just input their parameters (committee IDs, date ranges, etc.) and get back clean, structured JSON.</p> <p>Key Technical Challenges we solved:</p> <ul> <li>Pagination Hell: Automating the deep pagination required to fetch thousands of contribution records.</li> <li>Rate Limiting: Handling the FEC's API limits gracefully so the scraper doesn't get blocked mid-job.</li> <li>Data Normalization: structuring the output so it's ready for visualization libraries or SQL databases immediately.</li> </ul> <p><strong>The Unexpected Win!</strong></p> <p>We built this primarily to help the ecosystem, but this week we received some amazing validation. Apify selected our project as the winner of their "Social Good" Spotlight!</p> <p>It was a great reminder that as developers, our side projects can have a real impact on transparency and democracy. It’s not always about building the next SaaS, sometimes it’s about making information free.</p> <p>Try it out</p> <p>If you are building in the Civic Tech or GovTech space, I’d love for you to stress-test it.</p> <p>The Actor: <a href="https://apify.com/parseforge/fec-campaign-finance-contributions-scraper" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://apify.com/parseforge/fec-campaign-finance-contributions-scraper</a></p> <p>The Goal: To help journalists track money in politics without needing a CS degree.</p> <p>Question for the community: Have you worked with other government APIs? Which ones are the most painful to integrate? I’m looking for our next project!</p> automation