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Here's some information for those interested in the technical composition and journey of this site.

I released the site for the first time in May 2023 after ideating and building for about a year, using the following:

I was essentially using Django as a CMS to enter and manage the street data — which there was a lot of. Here's a rough sketch of my process:

  • Use a combination of a custom web scraper and manual research to identify the relevant streets, women linked to them, and core information such as location;
  • Document these in a spreadsheet and mark to-be-visited streets on a map visible only to me;
  • If I was going somewhere in the city, check map for whether there are any streets nearby I could do a quick detour to for a photo (or do an expedition in my free time);
  • Record these entries in a CMS with information gleaned from the spreadsheet, add photo, put together a relatively detailed biography of the person using a variety of sources, often translating from German.
  • Do final checks, mark it as done, then it became instantly available to view on the website.

And for a while, this kind of worked. I spoke about the project at conferences and meetups. I was super proud of it and saw lots of potential in it. However, I knew it was going to take forever to complete. After all, there was lots of technical maintenance to be done, not to mention adding all the content. On top of a full-time job, other personal projects, life generally, and, you know, finding time to rest, I started to feel exhausted just thinking about Named After Women.

In May 2025, I made the decision to do a technical overhaul and turn the site into a more static monorepo, which has been a relief in terms of cost, performance, maintainability, and security. The street data is now queried from a Supabase instance, and the site itself is hosted on Vercel, both of which are in AWS EU-West-1 (long-term, I hope to find an alternative solution).

AI transparency note:

I used v0 to bootstrap the basic layout of the 2025 site to save myself the headache of designing something to my specifications from scratch, enabling me to focus my energies on other aspects. I then made a whole lot of corrections and customisations to the code myself (e.g. swapping out the generated map component for the one I'd built for the previous site).

Above anything else, Named After Women is a project of passion. That includes the fact that I have spent many days and evenings researching and cracking codes that would get parts of the website to work, which has brought its own brand of satisfaction. In order to continue in this spirit of sticking with my own direction and ethics as closely as possible, I would like to draw a boundary and keep the generative AI technologies that I use in my daily employment as a developer away from this project.