❯ cat projects/nola-map.md

New Orleans Map

Personal project · 2026

The Bombay Beach app turned into a reusable city template. Local Reddit recommendations became a categorized map layer with an LLM's help.

my part: Design & development.
credits: Julia Vvedenskaya (design & development), Vincent Naples (data & development)
stack: React, Google Maps API, LLMs, Data pipelines
links: Live map, Studio case study

Satellite map of New Orleans with colored recommendation pins

## context

Once the Bombay Beach app had proved itself, we split the platform from the data so it could be reused for trips. New Orleans was the first city.

## challenge

The best recommendations were spread across years of local Reddit threads, repeated, contradictory and unstructured.

## what i built

A trip planner with category-colored pins, search and filtering, favorites, schedule and calendar views, a satellite/street toggle, and a mobile-first layout for walking around the city.

## approach & trade-offs

Adding .json to a Reddit thread URL returns the whole discussion as JSON. Three threads went to an LLM with instructions to deduplicate mentions and categorize each place with the app's existing tags.

## outcome

A browsable map of community-recommended places, from Art and Music to Food, History and Lodging. Starting a new city is now mostly a matter of building its dataset.

Mobile list of recommended places by category — # mobile list of recommended places by category

cd .. | next: NYC Accessible Places