Month: July 2024

I’ve been pretty quiet on this blog, but I’ve been busy behind the scenes. One of the projects I’ve worked on is https://www.ispecookay.com/, my first major project built in Serverless!

Thanks to COVID, I was made a remote employee, which now means most days I’m in my apartment building about 23 hours a day.  This means that if power is lost in the middle of the day, I’ll notice it.  If PECO has to do maintenance in the middle of the day, I’ll notice it. If a storm takes out power for several hours, I’ll definitely notice it.

While sitting around in the dark and refreshing PECO’s status page, I found that I really only cared about two values:

• How many customers are without power?
• Is that number moving up or down?

If the number is moving up, that means things are getting worse and I shouldn’t expect power back for awhile. If the number is moving down, it means that restorations are happening, and I should expect power back sooner. And that is largely why I built https://www.ispecookay.com/.

I also want to state that I am throwing absolutely NO shade on PECO, I found that their existing outage page did not meet my needs, because it is very content and Javascript heavy, and when there is a power outage going on, I would like to conserve my phone’s battery.  CNN does a great job at this with CNN Lite and it was one of my inspirations for “Is PECO Okay?”.