My wife has lived in Portland her whole life and loves this city very much. She is involved in the food scene, so whenever a new bar, restaurant, bakery, coffee shop, butcher, fishmonger, speakeasy, brewpub, sushi counter, pizzeria, taco truck, hot dog stand, or bistro opens, she is among the first visitors.

So when people are coming from out of town and ask, 'Well, what should we do?' - she often has too many answers. She created a Google Sheets page a few years ago to keep track of everything, but recently we decided to give the spreadsheet a facelift and created Riley's Recs. It turned out pretty cool.

I used a few new tools to build this site. The first is FastAPI, which is a really cool project and improves on Flask in a lot of significant ways- I love the static typing, auto generated documentation, and the fact that it has things like websockets built-in. Really cool!

I also used HTMX to do a lot of front-end. It's really neat and growing in popularity. Simplifies the front-end dependency stack (which was in my opinion getting out of hand in the React/npm world) and makes simple stuff like manipulating the DOM with GET/POST responses really easy.

Finally we also used a cool tool called Airtable to host the content. It's essentially a hosted RDBMS, that looks like a series of spreadsheets from the front-end. This allows her to quickly add or edit content. Airtable has an easy to use Python wrapper which I used to consume the data.

All in all, this is a small, lightweight tech stack that is really easy to standup and enjoyable to tinker with. Enjoy the recommendations.