I built a lightning-fast statistics platform for Poland

#elixir #datascience #webdev #ui

I needed Polish demographic data for a project and kept running into the same problem. The official statistics site (GUS) was slow, confusing, and the language they use is pretty hard to parse even if you speak Polish. And ChatGPT kept giving me different numbers every time I asked.

So I thought, why not just build something better?

What it actualy does

You click on any region in Poland and you get the stats. Thats it. No loading, no waiting, no confusing navigation. You can go from the whole country down to voivodeship (thats like a province), then to powiat (county), and all the way down to gmina which is like a commune or municipality. Theres over 2,478 gminas and each one has its own page with stats.

Population, housing, geography, demographics — all pulled from GUS which is the official government statistics office. Same data they have, just actually usable.

The tech side

I built this in Elixir. Partly because I love the language but mainly because I wanted pages to load instantly. Not fast, instant. Like you click and its already there. Elixir's concurrency model and the way Phoenix handles requests made this possible. I also built a custom template engine that allow me to create super good text!

The whole thing runs in both English and Polish. Same data, same interface, just switch the language. No weird google translate stuff, its properly localized.

Why I think this matters

Government data should be accessible to everyone not just researchers who know how to navigate confusing websites. Now you can find the population of any gmina in Poland in like 2 seconds.

Whats next

Im planning to add more datasets — economy, education, transport, environment. Eventually I want to build API access so developers can pull this data programatically. And theres some ideas around property predictions based on regional trends but thats further out.