# On Dima's Radar

Atlanta events ranked against my actual taste, then turned into easy invitations that help me do more of what brings me joy and stay closer to people I care about.

Used to send real invitations and turn reconnections into specific plans. One invite can combine events, open dates, and evergreen fallbacks. No formal response-rate or event-coverage measurement yet.

## The Problem

I kept finding out about great Atlanta stuff after it happened. Eventbrite could give me 500 events, but it couldn’t answer the question I actually had: _I want to see Dave — what are six things we’d both like, and which three nights am I free?_  
I wanted more music, dancing, outdoor adventures, and family activities. With two small kids, calendars did most of the deciding. The hard part was turning “we should hang out” into a plan someone could say yes to.

## What It Is

Radar scrapes the city wide, then ranks everything against a taste profile built from years of my concert history and Spotify data — each event scored 0–100 by an LLM across five axes: genre match, venue quality, format rarity, lineup strength, value for money. Radar charts show why each event received its score. A wizard walks through a few preference questions and re-ranks everything live.

The feed updates continuously; alongside dated events, a deep bench of evergreen activities (free hikes, pools, family spots) covers the “what do we do _today_” case.

The feed is deliberately broad. The useful output is deliberately short.

## The Part That Matters: The Invite

Finding the right event is one half of the job. The other is turning it into a plan: pick a handful of events plus a few free evenings, and send one link or a plain-text invite a friend can answer with a yes or a maybe in a single text. Proposed times and evergreen fallbacks reduce the back-and-forth that usually kills a plan.

## When It Became Real

By July, I was no longer only demoing Radar. I was using it in the part of life it was built for: reconnecting with people.

In one conversation, a friend and I moved from talking generally about getting together to a short invitation with a Shakespeare performance, a storytelling night, live music, and a specific afternoon for coffee. In coaching, I caught myself describing the site as something I had been **using to make plans and connections**. That mattered more than merely having built it.

The outcome I care about is a plan that leaves the group chat.

## How I Use It

- **Weekend scan** — Friday morning, see what’s good in the next 2–3 days
- **Spontaneous Sunday** — browse evergreen activities for impromptu outings
- **Date night** — filter for “Dima + Jeannie, no kids”
- **Family outing** — age-gated activities filtered for a 4-year-old
- **Reconnection** — a weekly script pairs overdue friends with upcoming events as a concrete excuse to reach out

## What Is Still Uncertain

- Whether people besides me find the ranking meaningfully better than a normal calendar
- Which sources and neighborhoods the scraper still misses
- Whether an invitation link gets a faster answer than a thoughtful text
- How much calendar context can be useful without making the tool invasive

Those are usage questions, not feature requests. The next version should come from watching people plan.

## Models, agents, tools, and infrastructure

**Claude + taste profiles**  
Scores a wide event feed against my actual music, venue, format, and value preferences.

**Scraping + public event feeds**  
Pulls from many sources because no single Atlanta calendar covers the city well.

**Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript**  
Keeps the event browser, filters, maps, and invitation flow fast and portable.

**Leaflet**  
Maps events and evergreen activities with clustered, mobile-friendly markers.

**Calendar context**  
Turns event discovery into a practical choice among nights that could actually work.

**Vercel analytics + PostHog**  
Tracks how the live site gets used without pretending usage already proves impact.