Mongoled: https://mongoled.com

It's a tool to browse Military history in a visualized and fun way, and dive into it using wikipedia. 

Idea:

I love history. I love listenting to Hardcore History, and reading about events that shaped us. As I was reading about a person (Dutch general) I saw some painting of the events. It also gave me the chills. for a moment, I thought I was really there. It was a great experience. And then I thought about moving this experience to a bigger scale.

What if I could go back in time, choose a moment I like, and see what happens? I wanted to make it real, by finding a way to gather:

(a) quality paintings that depicts battles, events, etc.

(b) quality data that allows to divr into those events

It sounded like a project worth doing.

Implementation:

It took me 3 weeks in which I completely wasted my time mostly. I wanted to do it as fast as possible and as lean as possible, but I wasn't ready to let go. I didn't understand that shipping a lean project means you have to tolerate its heavy flaws, and do nothing, because they are don't strictly matter to a basic functionality. There's of course setbacks, but If I would stay focused on what strictly attered, it would take a week.

I ended up querying wikidata, which is a wikimedia porject that stores in it milions of structured data readable by machines. For the actual website, I used svelte and firebase. Svelte was new for me, so I learned it. 

My initial plans for tens of thousands of art didn't yet came to their fulfillment. I found it tough to query for historical events becuase they can vary a lot, and wikidata isn't perfect. It was also tough to queey only art, that's not heavily licensed, that has a wikipedia article associated with it. For those reasons, and decision to ship faster the website now concludes mostly military history, and includes maps and non-art images.

Plans for the future:

I want to scale it. I truly believe it could be much better. I believe the vision for all-in-one history browser can be done, and it can make history fun once more. 

Currently, the most important thing I consider is more data. I look forward to improve my query methods, find another sources, and improve the quality of the selected images.

In conjunction, I want to make the website load faster and lower its bandwidth*.

I'll work on it!

*bandwith is the data size that's transfered from the website to the end user. It's slows everything down and It's not free.