Case Study · Open Data Product

California School Explorer

Rui built an open-source public-data product that helps families, researchers, and education teams compare California schools with context, source notes, subgroup lenses, and transparent reliability guidance.

9,946School profiles
3.9M+Canonical facts
9Education indicators
32Subgroup lenses
California School Explorer comparison interface with school cards and contextual filters

The Product Problem

Official California education data is powerful but fragmented across datasets, years, denominators, suppressed rows, and reporting rules. Simple rankings hide uncertainty and context, so Rui designed the product around transparent comparison rather than one-score judgment.

Rui's Role

Rui handled the product direction, frontend implementation, data modeling, reproducible Python processing, source validation, PostgreSQL canonical storage, and Cloudflare deployment path.

California School Explorer comparison view
Side-by-side comparison with filters, context panels, and transparent indicator summaries.
California School Explorer family decision brief
Shareable decision brief view that turns public data into an explainable comparison artifact.

What Rui Built

  • Context-aware comparison: school profiles, side-by-side compare, nearby schools, same-district references, and similar-context baselines.
  • Trustworthy data layer: canonical facts, deterministic migrations, source notes, denominator visibility, suppression handling, freshness, and comparability caveats.
  • Decision artifacts: family briefs and shareable comparison URLs that communicate tradeoffs without hiding methodology.
  • Open-source product engineering: React, TypeScript, Python data tooling, PostgreSQL, and Cloudflare Worker Static Assets.

Capability Signal

This project shows Rui's strength at the intersection of data engineering, product judgment, frontend systems, public-data governance, and trustworthy analytics communication.

Source Links