ml-

Nice job. A small suggestion, unless I completely missed it, an option to filter by post / blog language.

Oh, thanks for the interest, but I'm not that far along yet. I have a bare bones alpha, but it's not ready for the internet just yet. I also haven't secured the domain names so I won't be sharing any code names :)

This is so very silly, but the only way I have to collect emails for people interested in the progress, beta testing or final version, is on my beer page.. So I created a page for the world's most obscure / smallest city and if you want to be updated you can register there - https://wheretodrink.beer/in/croatia/hum-75gkn - The registration is under "Stay informed about updates in Hum?"

If anyone signs up I'll manually move you out of that list and into the "local history" waitlist.

Want to put local history on a map, so when I go somewhere I could ideally just open this webapp and immediately get presented with cool or interesting history that happened close by.

Currently spending time establishing relationships with historical societies, as I really need them to contribute points of interest, and stories. Many of these societies are run on a voluntary basis by 70+ year olds, so it's a long process. Getting some good responses eventually though, so it might actually go somewhere, just a lot slower than I want.

Also still doing https://wheretodrink.beer, but haven't added anything of note since playing on this other project.

And react2shell was a blast

Doing something similar for a non-public project. How do you deal with remixing feeds, and the potential mix of formats (rss, atom, etc)? I need to create new feeds as well, and if its done by normalizing, sanitizing content, etc. I feel I misrepresent the original content, and probably breach the implicit license granted by syndicating via feed.

Probably very few creators care one way or another, as the links are going to the original content. Just interested if people had an opinion on the matter.

Want to put local history on a map, so when I go somewhere I could ideally just open this webapp and immediately get presented with cool or interesting history that happened close by.

Currently spending time establishing relationships with historical societies, as I really need them to contribute points of interest, and stories. Many of these societies are run on a voluntary basis by 70+ year olds, so it's a long process. Getting some good responses eventually though, so it might actually go somewhere, just a lot slower than I want.

Also still doing https://wheretodrink.beer, but haven't added anything of note since playing on this other project.

And react2shell was a fun time

Aha.. yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that's probably the best way to catch the more niche and special interest history.

Yeah, that's cool. Currently tangential, but conceptually not something that would be completely out of scope in the end. I'm planning to use machine translations, text-to-speech, and multi modal generative models for accessibility already. There's also an idea for baking in GPS audio tours. Obviously depends on sourcing some quality content first

When you say open source is it so you could self host it, use your "own" models, and curate your own datasets? or some other reasons? I could see a future where a lot of the project could potentially be open sourced and work with any defined geojson API.

Started work on a project to put local history on a map. If I go somewhere I would ideally want to just open this webapp and immediately get presented with cool or interesting history that happened close by.

Maybe it's a story about named local fishermen from the early 1900s, with pictures, the history of a statue and videos of the process, or the state of a graffiti wall over time.

Currently in a phase of UI development and testing, and historical societies outreach for collaboration. It might stall and just fizzle into nothing, or it might be something cool.

Also still doing https://wheretodrink.beer, but haven't added anything of note since playing on this other project.

Still working on cataloging a curated list of craft beer venues across the world at https://wheretodrink.beer Unsure what the plan is going forward with it, apart from adding more venues and more countries. As long as it's fun for me I'll just keep adding things.

Just added health inspection data from countries that have that in open datasets (UK and Denmark). If anyone know of others I'd be appreciative of hints.

Thinking of focusing on another idea for the rest of the year, have a rough idea for a map based ui to structure history by geofences or lat / lng points for small local museums

The number and the fire icons are popularity ratings, and shouldn't be expected to say a lot about quality. That value is derived from a set of automated signals that can be considered proxies for popularity. For most markets we typically see a couple of stand outs, and "the rest". One major flaw is also that we don't know venue capacity, so this probably does bias towards bigger venues

For NYC specifically it could be many factors playing in.. Perhaps we don't really have the right venues listed? Maybe the city favors small neighborhood bars over bigger destinations? etc..

I just recently added the number behind the icons, but one of my concerns was that it would then be interpreted as a review rating. Might re-consider the UX of this now. Thanks for feedback!

That sucks. I see the value in that, and I can add a tag for it. Imagine maintaining a consistent status for that automatically would be hard though. So the meaning of such a tag would likely become "They had at least one gluten free option at one time".

For venues publishing their drafts, cans or bottles publicly it could be possible to create some confidence interval if we scrape the data and keep history of it.

Thanks for checking it out and leaving a suggestion for improvement!

Still working on cataloging a curated list of craft beer venues across the world at https://wheretodrink.beer

Unsure what the plan is going forward with it, apart from adding more venues and more countries. As long as it's fun for me I'll just keep adding things.

Next addition will be to add health inspection data from countries that have that in open datasets or APIs, so if anyone know of that I'd be appreciative of hints (know of UK, Norway and might have found for France).

The idea came from me wanting a curated up to date list for myself. I thought the alternatives are/were outdated, poorly maintained and/or pay-to-rank. When ratebeer shut down earlier this year I thought I might as well offer this as a potential replacement for the venue listings.

The data is initially crowd sourced, or researched by me when I'm bored. Keeping things updated is done with various automated (and some manual) alive checks for each venue.

I know you're right about the landing page. Would be nice to show the closest venues or locations there immediately, but I absolutely loathe pages that ask for positional data right off the bat (could do some geoip stuff maybe).

Working on cataloging a curated list of craft beer venues across the world at https://wheretodrink.beer

Unsure what the plan is going forward with it, apart from adding more venues and more countries. As long as it's fun for me I'll just keep going, but it does probably need a differentiator to be interesting.

One of these again.. love to see all the projects, but man time flies when you're not doing much

Still slowly expanding https://wheretodrink.beer with new mini-features I want (like the obscurely hidden https://wheretodrink.beer/near-me - it probably need an interactive map), and adding on new venues. Struggling with getting any sort of organic traffic, but not sure that's even something I want..

Been toying with creating some other projects; one for helping with lost+found for SMBs in hospitality, and another with administrating "co-operatives" (collecting dues, coms, automating legal requirements).. So naturally you start building all the scaffolding that you could have bought, like gdpr-compliant privacy first multi tenant authentication.. That's fun, but I should know better.

Still on a sabbatical building things I enjoy, but it's summer here so have also spent much time in my hammock with cold beers.

Most effort on https://wheretodrink.beer, collecting and cataloging craft beer venues from around the world. No ambition of being exhaustive, but aiming for a curated and substantial list. Since last month I've added a couple of minor things like maps and "where to go next" sections for each venue.

I'm debating whether or not I should add user accounts, and let people maintain venue bucket lists, venue endorsements. Also planning to reach out to the venues and ask if they agree to monthly or quarterly one-click information verification emails from us.

Other projects that receive less love are:

- https://drnk.beer, a small side project offering beer-related linkpages, and @handles for Bluesky (AT Protocol)

- https://misplacy.com, just a dumb and wrong AI landing page for now but was thinking to work towards a drop-in solution for SMBs around lost/found management.

- A platform for helping voluntary associations with repetitive administrative tasks (non-english so not linking. Trying to rank the pain points currently)

- A platform for structuring national soccer club history (initial brain dump idea phase)

- A platform for structuring writing prompts and collaborative fiction writing (initial brain dump / mockups)

For the next month or so I think I need to prioritize what to focus on after summer

Always interesting to see what others are building and doing. So thanks for sharing!

Great, thanks! The first entries for South America!

Appreciate it! In the end, a lot of manual work to be honest.

Think around 5% is from visitors, 10-15% from my own experience and the rest just procrastination research.

Started with the cities I know well, and after that adding on countries or cities close by, main focus has been Europe. At one point I tried to use ratebeer's dataset as a starting point, before they closed down, but it was so horribly outdated and irrelevant that it was more work than sourcing manually.

So I basically look for existing blog-ish top-lists for a city, then try to verify the information with search, social media, untappd, etc. Looking for social proof that the venue is operational and relevant.

To keep it updated I have some very rudimentary monthly tasks to ping a venue's website and notify me on things that signal they're closed. I also email myself a list of 10 random venues with all relevant links daily, so I can do a manual 5 min alive check.

Still on my sabbatical and continuing to build on things I enjoy rather than things that pay (for now).

Main focus is https://wheretodrink.beer, collecting and cataloging craft beer venues from around the world. No ambition of being exhaustive, but aiming for a curated and substantial list. After the last thread, a bunch of people added their suggestions, thanks! It helped add interesting new venues from cities I hadn’t covered yet.

I’m very slowly layering on features, and have a few spin-off ideas I’ll keep brewing on for later. The hardest problem thus far has been attempting to automate popularity rankings and automatic removal of defunct venues without breaching a bunch of ToS.

Also made https://drnk.beer, a small side project offering beer-related linkpages and @handles for Bluesky (AT Protocol). It's been on the backburner, but still very much live.

Probably looking for another small project for the next few months to focus on something else for a while. Always curious to see what others are building and doing. Thanks for sharing!

The correct™ way is probably betting on what has the highest theoretical ROI, based on user cohort research and...

I'm not doing it the correct way, I don't want to do it the right way.. it doesn't give me any joy. I'd rather make a bunch of stuff no-one wants, and delete it later than spending time on figuring out what is the correct thing. The process is whatever I feel like doing that day. This is my main motivation for not going back to organized employment.

Of course, that's not the whole picture. The more paying users you get, the more you have to do the things that are burning.. those are usually pretty obvious from feedback from your systems and users. In this context I like to attempt to rank by opportunity costs or costs of delay to figure out what is important.

For my own goal setting I now rarely bother setting anything longer than "What can I incrementally improve in the next 2 hours". My backlogs are full, sort of sorted by some perceived importance (totally adhoc), and varied enough that I usually have something to do that works with my current mood. This definitely doesn't lend itself to moving in one coherent direction, but who cares.. the needle moves, just a bit slower than it would have with more focus.

In the end I think it very much depends what your goal is with going solo.. are you chasing unicorns, or just giving middle fingers to the industry living your best life.

tl;dr Whatever I feel like at any given hour

For me it has been cross pollination. Do things that help with all other aspects of being human, and it will pay off in the long run. What that means is highly subjective and personal.

After being in the field for a little while you come to realize that languages are just dialects on the same core, new tech and frameworks are mostly just different wrapping, and that the core tenets and fundamentals that you know will always be there in some form.

What will help you with longevity are things that are not traditionally looked at as SWE skills. Things like empathy for users and other developers, communication skills, being able to iteratively create user value, understanding costs of delays and that perfect is rarely what we want, etc, etc, etc.. Solving logic issues with algorithms is such a minute part of what we do, and the part most likely to be automated at some point.

Love these threads..

Decided to do an extended sabbatical after being part of one of the many tech layoffs the last years, and I'm thus working on things I like, instead of things that pay..

Collecting and cataloging craft beer venues from around the world, at https://wheretodrink.beer Still a WIP, and it's not trying to be the most extensive list, but I want it to be a substantial list. Once I reach a certain maturity in the data I'll probably look to spawn minor projects off from the data set.. have a couple ideas already that I'll just keep to my self for now :D

I also had a set of left over domains relating to beer that I'm offering up for use with BlueSky handles, and beer related link pages at https://drnk.beer - a bit on the back burner.