Polarus

Polarus is a personalized guide to voting in Texas, built to close the information gap around down-ballot, local, and legislative races. A Python web scraper pulls legislator and bill data directly from the official Texas Legislature site; a Flask backend serves that data to a React frontend, which presents it based on the user’s location and relevant representatives.

Built at HackTX 2025 alongside Tianna Davis, Ila Wallace, and Ruth Assefa. My contribution was the data layer: I engineered the relational database using MySQL and SQLAlchemy to structure and store the scraped legislative data, and built the backend data-processing workflows connecting the scraper to the database, reducing manual data handling and keeping the pipeline’s output consistent as new bills and legislators were added.

Stack: Python, MySQL, SQLAlchemy, Flask, React