trips

As always, something trivial annoyed me and I completely overengineered the solution.

Simply, the list view not keeping your scroll position when you checked on a place, you were pinged back to the top.

A few hundred thousand tokens later, and here we are. This project was unapologetically vibe coded, much of it from my phone while on the trip. It did its job, I kept on top of code best practices to a degree, and nobody died.

Honestly, a lot of what I build - personal or for work - follows the ethos of “dropping a config file somewhere is enough”. Realistically, nine times out of ten, if you build a fancy UI for editing things, the thing becomes harder for an engineer to edit, and the stakeholder who asked for it ends up not touching it anyway. Not being cynical, just experience. So yeah, when the thing is just for me and Edele, we can wrangle some JSON into GitHub easily enough.

Plus, this way, an LLM can build out the config for me - which is exactly how the first iteration of this came to be, from a Google Takeout export.

It has rudimentary Swarm-style “I visited here” already, but honestly I’d go deeper replicating that old, mid-2010s social “check in” vibe. It’s a cute way of sharing photos with family and friends while you travel, and something about the spatial quality of a map makes it richer for a good old fashioned reminisce a year or two later.