The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration provides a list of 1.7 million carriers in the United States. The list is a CSV file with 1.7 million rows, and of course it’s hard to manage or do anything with it. I’ve made the Census Crunch application which lets you search the data and download subsets of the information in CSV format. Use it at your own risk!
Do you have questions? Do you need an improvement? Please tell me! The Census Crunch is a case study in software development, and support is part of software development. I need to include support in my case study.
I started writing the application in order to market myself: I wanted to pretend that I take such applications for breakfast. However, as so often happens in software development, I went through lunch and dinner and breakfast again. It took me a good 15 hours over two weeks. Which made me think of another thing that made it useful. I decided to use it as a case study to show why software development takes so long. I’ve tracked exactly how much time I spent on each part of the functionality and I’ll write one or two articles for non-technical people that explain with a concrete example why software development takes so long.
Finally, I’m also using it myself; but of course the application won’t pay off with this alone, as I could do what I want, if less easily, with good old Unix tools.
The Census Crunch is free software; you can get it at GitHub.