I built this site initially as an interesting side project, to keep track of places I've travelled, the number of flights, buses, and trains, and the total kilometers passed by. Since then it's morphed into a map tracking, blog filled complex travel site, that covers a good array of just how much there is to see in the world. I've added a statistics page, and the map is good fun. Click through to the map, use the filters, and hopefully, it might be an interest to someone other than me!

The name AhBeGrand is a general rule of how to live life - a mix of both it'll be fine, and, what's the worst that could happen? I've found it a good philosophy while travelling, and throughout day to day life.

On the tech side, I built the website using nextjs, react, with a mongodb backend. Images and videos are stored in an S3 bucket. The first version was manually coded in 2022, and the initial data manually entered from then until 2026. Version 2.0 (current) was built primarily using cursor as a junior web developer, and me as a senior dev/ project lead, that gave the agent a detailed breakdown of what I wanted, my vision, rules to follow, and stylistic guides through a variety of agent.md files.

More on the tech side - there's an auth stream for access to admin, customised admin panels for a variety of CRUD functions, and for viewing google analytics. The statistics page has drilldown graphs so users can deep dive into the data.

At the moment data is still manually entered. Statistics update automatically.

Future plans is an AI that will automatically scrap my email for new flights/bus tickets/train tickets/countries and add that data automatically. Be grand.