Monitor performance issues & errors in your code

Python at the US Federal Election Commission

Episode #317, published Fri, May 21, 2021, recorded Wed, May 19, 2021

When you think of government software development and projects, do you fast apps and modern tech stacks jump to mind? Probably not. So you'll be delighted to hear from our guest, Laura Beaufort. She's the Tech Lead at the US Federal Election Commission.

She and her team have built a very modern tech stack running modern Flask web apps with APIs powered by SQLAlchemy and Flask-RESTFUL. The app is available open-source on GitHub. And they deploy it with continuous delivery out to cloud.gov.

There are lots of lessons to learn for governmental agencies around the world as well as private organizations, small and large.

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Links from the show

Laura on Twitter: @laurabeaufort
Wagtail CMS: wagtail.io
FEC: fec.gov
18F: 18f.gsa.gov
Open source at the FEC: code.gov
Cloud.gov PaaS: cloud.gov
18F De-risking Guide: derisking-guide.18f.gov
US Digital Services episode: talkpython.fm
Digital Services Playbook: playbook.cio.gov
Digital.gov Communities of practice: digital.gov
FEC Github Repos: github.com
Laura's presentation to community of practice: youtube.com
YouTube Live Stream: youtube.com
Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm

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Laura Beaufort
Laura Beaufort
Laura Beaufort is the Technical Lead for the Federal Election Commission. At the FEC, she works to increase transparency in elections by making campaign finance data available at fec.gov and through the FEC API. Her favorite things to work on are application security, performance improvement, and fixing bugs. She also actively participates in the open source community, having contributed to several open source projects, including flask-sqlalchemy.
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