PECO, also known as the Philadelphia Electric Company, is the energy utility that serves 1.6 million electric customers in the Philadelphia area.
No. This website is neither run nor endorsed by PECO. It is my personal side-project.
This website displays PECO outage stats across their entire customer base. It is an alternative to PECO’s Official Status Page.
I found that when a storm comes through and I lose power, I would obsessively refresh the PECO status page on my iPhone. But here’s the thing, I only cared about two numbers:
That’s it. That’s all I need to know. Everything else is extra. If the number is going UP, I know things are getting worse and that it might be awhile before I get power back. If the number is going DOWN, I know that restoration is happening, and I can expect power back sonner.
Anything else would just waste my phone’s battery, hence my decision to create this lightweight, text-based website. Even my memes are text-based!
I used Serverless and deployed on Amazon Web Services!
The HTML, Javascript, and CSS are managed with Hugo, which is an impressive static site generator.
The back end consists of AWS Lambda to provide API endpoints, with the underlying code being written in Python. The HTML is stored in an S3 bucket and served by CloudFront which performs SSL termination. The data is stored in DynamoDB.
For deplying APIs, Serverless is GREAT! For DynamoDB tables, it is a mixed bag. I do NOT recommend Serverless for Cloudfront distributions.
I did! If I were building this in the workplace, I would have used jQuery and Bootstrap, because when you’re in the office, your job is to complete things quickly, using the tools at hand, absent a really good reason to do it in a way that will take longer.
But this ain’t the office, this is a side project. And it’s been awhile since I built something without using either a Javascript or CSS framework, and I really wanted to craft some straight up Javascript and CSS. So I did.
Because if I wanted to mess with individual pixels I’d go back to the 3rd Grade, write some Logo, and then have chocolate milk at lunch while eating hamburger hash with a spork.
…or you could just let me use Chart.js like an adult.
I used a Lambda@Edge function to add index.html as described on this page.
It would be really cool if that functionality was built into CloudFront, Amazon. Come on, Amazon, I know you can do it. I believe in you.
They are now! PECO’s leadership hasn’t complained to me or sent me any legal threats, and I take that to be a good sign. If nothing else, I hope the site brightened their day a little.
Yep! You can get the source at https://github.com/dmuth/is-peco-okay.
Yes! There is https://poweroutage.us/ which keeps track of power outages across the entire United States.
Yep! I’ve built a few things you may find interesting:
Technical.ly did a nice writeup on this site in Jun, 2024.
If you wanna interview me for a story on this site, feel free to reach out!
If you run into any problems, feel free to open an issue on GitHub.
Otherwise, you can find me on the hellscape that is Twitter, Facebook, or drop me an email: doug.muth AT gmail DOT com.