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Name Explorer

A web tool to analyze historical first name statistics in the US

Name Explorer

Problem

Coming up for a name for your child can be difficult. I tried some existing tools out there to get ideas but I ultimately wanted to see the statistics behind each name

Solution

I downloaded a raw copy of the US Census Bureau's name statistics and wrote a script to import it into a MariaDB database . I then decided to play around with next.js to build a little page where I can inspect the results. I'm not sure how useful this is to anyone but me, but I had a blast building it!

Notes

  • This was my first project using Next.js and it was a great experience.
  • This was also my first time using any type of ORM, which was Sequelize . I still have mixed feelings about these, as I prefer to work directly with the database...but it was pretty cool to model my tables in my project and sync directly to the database.

Stack

  • Next.js
  • MariaDB
  • Sequelize

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