As a lover of good food, I’ve always been curious about restaurant health inspections. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and create a tool that makes it easy to explore Toronto’s DineSafe data.

I built a scraper using Python and the sqlite-utils library. It gathers data on restaurant inspections and stores it in a SQLite database. But I didn’t stop there – I added some automation magic to make the process even more fun!

Now, thanks to a GitHub Actions workflow, the scraper runs every day at 9 am and deploys the database to an instance of Datasette running on Vercel.

Datasette is a super cool tool that lets you explore and visualize data in a fun and interactive way. So, whether you’re a foodie, data enthusiast, or just curious about what’s happening behind the scenes in your favorite restaurant, this project is for you.

Check out the GitHub repository to see the code and learn how to set up your own instance of the scraper. You can also explore the data and play around with visualizations on the DineSafe Toronto website.

I started working on a Dogsheep utility for processing Arc App’s Daily (or Monthly) JSON exports into a SQLite database. This provides the ability to analysis the places I visit and activities I am doing in Datasette.

I’ve published a working alpha version of the Dogsheep utility, arc-to-sqlite on my GitHub. Check it out if you are interested.