Atlas of Me
A travel scrapbook on a spinning globe. Currently building.
A personal travel scrapbook app where memories live on an interactive 3D globe. You pin where you've been, log what you felt, and watch your life take shape geographically. Built with Next.js 15, PostgreSQL, Clerk auth, and Cloudinary for media.
What it is
Atlas of Me is a travel memory app built around a 3D interactive globe. You add a memory — title, date, location, mood, photos — and it gets pinned to the globe at the right coordinates. You can browse chronologically, through a masonry gallery, or by spinning the globe and clicking where you've been.
The repo is called dear-life. The name felt right when I started it.
What was technically interesting
The globe is the interesting part. Polygon-based country rendering with hover highlighting, memory pins that sit at real geographic coordinates, and a react-globe.gl + topojson-client stack underneath. Getting the pins to feel physically attached to the surface — not floating artifacts — took more iteration than I expected.
The rest of the stack is deliberate: Next.js 15 App Router, PostgreSQL via Prisma for per-user data isolation, Clerk for auth, Cloudinary for media uploads. Each piece chosen for longevity over novelty.
Why I built it
I travel and I take photos. The photos sit in a folder. This felt like a problem worth solving in a way that's actually pleasant to use — not a spreadsheet, not a social network, just a private space where the shape of your life becomes visible geographically.
Also: I wanted to build something with a proper 3D rendering challenge in it. The globe was the excuse.