This site initially started as a curiosity about a single vote, and grew into a massive data scraping and visualization project.
Most of this data was obtained through the ProPublica Congress API. It's a great API with a lot of information (way more than I pulled for this), and I highly recommend using them if you want this data for your own project. Other data was pulled from the House Clerk's website using the Python web-scraping framework, Scrapy. I would suggest getting data from ProPublica first before going this route. I pulled data from 2001-present (over 5 million votes). There may be missing or incorrect data - if you find some, please report it on that page with the button.
This site was created in Python using the web framework Django. The visuals were created using D3.js. Special thanks to this bl.ocks page for the starting point for the vote visualization. I used Bootstrap for the basic styling, and Datatables for the tables.
My name is Steven. I'm currently a grad student at Georgia Tech. I decided not to take a course this Summer, but wanted to work on a project.