Bench dedications
While surfing the web, I found OpenBenches, a site that catalogs all memorial benches across the world. I didn’t see any entries for my city, but forgot about it. A few months later while walking to the park with my son, I was reminded of the site while looking at park benches. I started taking photos and came up with a goal to capture all the benches close by.
To help figure that out, I found all the bench data and then created a site that overlaid my own OpenBenches progress on top.
Features
- Show all OpenBench data on a map
- Match up city data with OpenBench data to show remainders
- Group remaining data by park/region
- Show total progress and progress in each park/region
- Search dedication text
Improvements and stuff to figure out
- The city data is not great. Some benches are just physically not there, or their dedication plaque has been removed
- Unclear how to deal with multiple plaques on one bench
- Do tables count as benches?
- Many benches near me are inaccessible by construction
- Lots of benches are on gravel paths, which isn’t great for pushing a stroller
Vibe coding
This is my first project where I’ve tried to use AI to generate as much code as possible.
- Every new feature makes the entire project harder to understand, so after a few, I’ve prompted to refactor the work.
- Functionality I knew how to write by hand was easy to review. Functionality I had not dealt with before, like Cloudflare’s Wrangler configuration, ended up being complicated to troubleshoot.
- Describing styling as a prompt is hard and I resorted to changing Tailwind classes by hand to it to look right.
- To troubleshoot certain bugs, the output added console logs and asked the output to be pasted into chat. I’m sure there is some browser/MCP way to do this that would have made it easier.
- One bug could never be fixed by prompting. It would generate a fix that would cause a second issue and then fix that issue which would return to the original bug.