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439 points david927 | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.714s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
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ml- ◴[] No.44416323[source]
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!

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1. nicbou ◴[] No.44416940[source]
How did you populate it? The Berlin list was pretty decent. I added one that came to mind.
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2. djfivyvusn ◴[] No.44417133[source]
[flagged]
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3. tomhow ◴[] No.44419556[source]
Please don't do this.
4. ml- ◴[] No.44420504[source]
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 At one point I tried to use ratebeer's dataset as a starting point, before they closed down, but it was so horribly outdated and irrelevant that it was more work than sourcing manually.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.