I’m building a website for discovering first names that’s enjoyable to explore: https://abracadanames.com

It started with a family member telling me they were frustrated with existing websites. What I noticed is that in many cases they feel cluttered and not smooth to use, almost like a 1-to-1 translation of the underlying database queries, where they have you choose filters and sorting options upfront then browse the paginated results.

I wanted to avoid all of that by creating a different experience; I built an interactive full-screen wall UI with infinite browsing so that most of the screen space is dedicated to the core content. I worked on the name sampling algorithm to try to make it as enjoyable to browse as I could, and the only filter displayed by default is the one to select genders.

More advanced queries are available through the search field which supports natural language queries, running on a local multilingual interpretation engine with a cloud LLM fallback. The database engine is custom built with Rust, compiled to WASM for higher performance when running on CloudFlare Workers. I don’t use an external DB service for names today.

What I’m pretty proud of is to know a lot of technical work is hidden behind that UI, and how it has been shaped by the experience I wanted instead of the other way around.