Election 2029: Introduction

Introduction

It's been over 8 months since I started my UK Election 2029 site, and high time that I actually wrote an introduction post so that I can get into more detailed topics later.

In 2024, shortly after the UK general election was announced, I created a small site at https://jonskeet.uk/election2024, initially to keep track of Sam Freedman's election predictions and compare them what actually happened. The scope of the site increased a little, but it was never intended to be particularly polished or for a wide audience. The total time between the first code push and the election was about 4 weeks.

On election day, however, I decided I'd enjoyed the experience so much that I registered the election2029.uk domain that day, created a new GitHub repo and a new GCP project, and pushed an initial holding page. See my earlier post about election night for more details about the 2024 site - I don't expect to go back over any of the technical details except for the purpose of comparison.

For the 2029 site I have a much broader target audience, and a much longer timescale. I doubt that many small" projects (in terms of the number of contributors and expected time spent) have deadlines quite as long as this. We don't have a date for the next UK general election yet, but I'm reasonably hopeful that it will be in 2029 - I'm guessing May 2029, personally. If we expect interest in the next election start warming up in late 2028 or early 2029, that still gives me over 4 years from the first registration date until when I expect the site to actually need to be reasonably appealing.

The date of the election is an interesting deadline, as it's simultaneously very generous" (I've never worked to such long timescales) and really sharp (if it only comes together the day after the election, it'll be pointless).

The site already (March 2025) has most of the functionality I'm expecting to include, so I hope most of the data schema is appropriate, even if the way that data is presented changes quite a lot. Even just within the last 8 months I've had a lot of fun on the technical side, and I'm hoping to share quite a lot of that via blog posts.

This post doesn't go into any of the technical aspects, but I think it's worth just going over what I'm trying to achieve.

Requirements

• Valuable and informative to both election geeks and the general public. (Thinking about what the average voter" wants to know is likely to be one of the biggest challenges, I suspect.)
• Entirely free for users - no subscriptions, ads, or even cookies.
• Fast for users - I see no reason why any page shouldn't load in the blink of an eye, and it should really use very small amounts of data. (External JavaScript libraries are likely to be bulk of data transfer, and those should only be needed if you want to see a visualization such as a map, graph or Sankey diagram.)
• Cheap for me - I shouldn't end up having to worry about how much the site is costing on a daily basis, unless it becomes very popular, unexpectedly... and even in my wildest dreams that's only likely to have a financial impact during the few weeks of the election campaign itself. (As a note of caution for this, I'm considering paying for advertising at some point, if I think I've got a site worth going to, but finding it hard to get traction. Obviously I'd love to get a mention on a popular podcast or similar, and then use word of mouth to get traffic.)
• Fun for me - if this starts being more of a chore than a joy (and assuming I don't have a significant user base who would feel let down at that point) I can just shut it down. I think this is very unlikely to happen though.
• Factful - this is not intended to be a vehicle for my political leanings, nor a chance to practise political analysis. There's always a potential risk of bias in terms of choosing which polls to include etc, but realistically I doubt that I'd actually exclude anything mainstream. (I won't be doing 538-style pollster ratings.)

Future posts

I'm expecting to write posts on the following topics over time - with some posts including multiple topics, I suspect.

• High level architecture and technology choices
• Data models: ElectionContext and ElectionCoreContext
• Third party APIs and data transformations
• Storage choices (Firestore and files)
• Having fun with JavaScript
• Storing over 2 million postcodes in a 1MB document
• Immutability, records and performance
• Multiple environments in a hobby project
• Hacking a background service" into Cloud Run

Do let me know in comments if there are any additional topics you'd like me to cover.