I am an extremely lazy person. I started on a new project recently that required me to delve into state and census tract data. The thought of the effort involved in locating and copy-and-pasting a dict mapping US state abbreviations to FIPS codes was so overwhelming that I just wanted to go take a nap instead. And once I got the FIPS code dict, I'd have to use it to generate URLs for state shapefile downloads. Ugh!

So instead of (yet again) copying a dict from some other source, I decided to do something more permanent. us, the result of my laziness, is a Python package that contains all sorts of state meta data in an easy to use API.