I wanted to build a website that could grow with me as I get older, and this is it. It keeps me accountable and pushes me to learn new things. Right now, it features movie and book reviews, a blog I plan to post on more often, a map page with travel goals, and a page with some of my photography and videos. I didn't know what shape it would take when I started, and I still add new pieces from time to time.

I've been collecting personal data on this site and built my own AI-powered recommendation tool. Because of it, I now have an ever-growing list of books and films to explore. Recommendation engines are powerful; they are a big part of how two of the most influential companies in the world make money, through targeted advertising and recommended content that captures your attention. AI lets anyone build a personal recommendation engine, not to drain your attention or sell you things, but to help you accomplish goals and thoughtfully explore any topic you like. The possibilities feel endless, and this website has been my main tool for exploring them.

Media Page

This is the first page I made on my website. It is simple I write reviews for films, books and shows I watch and this has been by far the most useful thing I made.

Having data for your own movies is awsome I built an actual good way to explore new media.

Map Page

The hardest part about making our map page was to find a search of truth. A map at with good enough quality, but not too high of quality with both countries and "subdivions" in which I have consistent IDs which I could map to different parts of our website.

I made many wrong decisions before coming to my working solution. I tried using different datasets and combining them together with python mapping libraries among other things, but I finally found and settled upon the data from the aptly named Natural Earth Data medium map, with cities gotten from the 10m more detailed map. I also scraped the national parks.

I also had to decide how to render my map, and I first went with a 2d map library which was fine, but at that point I didn't have the right data. Then wanted to get fancy with a 3d globe library that used threejs. It looked pretty but the load times were massive and it interrupted the flow with the rest of the site, and it was more aesthetically pleasing than it was useful, and I wanted this map to actually be of use to me.

The final solution I went with was building my own map viewer with d3.js as the way to render my map with a mercator projection and was easily able to map everything else with coordinates, and once I had the right data at the correct quality balancing detail and performance, it was working pretty smoothly.

You can check it out here. I am constantly reworking and adding new things so it could very well be broken, but at some point in the future it should be in a good stable state.

Photography

Simple place for me to showcase my photography. I am not a great photographer, I can't say I'm taking photos all that often. I have a Cannon EOS R-100, about the cheapest mirrorless camera you can get. I learned all about optimization of images for web performance in making this page.