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Show HN: I made a website where you can create your own "Life in Weeks" timeline

by czue on 2/26/25, 1:58 PM with 68 comments

  • by czue on 2/26/25, 2:12 PM

    After I saw Gina Trapani's "Life in Weeks" last week I got the idea that letting anyone make one would be a cool product. I've been working on this off and on for the last week, and have gotten it good enough where I'm ready to get feedback. You can add "Periods" (colors) as well as "Events" to your timeline. You can also record longer details that show up on hover, automatically add world events, and export/import the entire thing to a file.

    Happy to answer any questions about the app or build any feature requests in near-real time!

  • by pcthrowaway on 3/1/25, 10:07 PM

    This is very, very, cool. But I am a little worried it's also a social engineer's wet dream.

    It'd be great to put everyone's birthday as January 1 of the year they were born by default, and scrub things such as:

    * City names other than (maybe) the city they currently live in

    * Proper names e.g. first partners, spouses, pets (I have no idea how you'd do this though, other than warning users if one of the top 1000 names are detected in their explanatory text or something)

    * Names of vehicles

    Honestly with how varied security questions can be these days I hesitate to suggest there's even a "safe" list of personal facts which can be publicly displayed. Obviously whatever you might put on LinkedIn or a resume is fair game, but anything beyond that may really open you up to attacks.

  • by mikesabat on 3/2/25, 12:50 AM

    I'm sure it's on your list, but I think it would be helpful if I could click into the timeline in order to add an event/period of my life. I think there could be a really cool interface expanding years and drilling into certain time periods.

    Also, as I get older I remember events, but I'm not sure when they happened. I remember being in a certain city on St. Patty's Day, but can't remember what year that might have been.

    I got a little obsessed with this idea of journaling my life during the pandemic. I would record videos for my kids to watch in 20+ years. I figure they'll get a kick out of seeing their dad young and talking about current events. I built a site and made my parents record stories about their life - viography.co (try it free functionality is currently being rebuilt and not working. If you want a code dm me).

    For the life in weeks, I think the more information that can be saved makes it more valuable. Personally I'm playing around with the idea of turning my site into a weekly video journal. It seems like everyone is putting a ton of content online, it's mostly ephemeral and clickbait-y and as we all get older we'll wish we made more substantial recordings of ourselves and our situations.

  • by cperciva on 3/2/25, 4:11 AM

    Feature request: Overlapping time periods. I was a high school student from 1993-1998, but I was a university student from 1994-2000. (And then a student at a different university from 2001-2005.) Many people won't have high school and university overlapping, but overlapping education and career often do.

    Maybe interesting to add relationships (at very least marriage?) as visible time periods too.

  • by rtsang1 on 3/2/25, 9:34 AM

    Awesome work. I’ve been browsing for a tool like this after seeing it a few weeks ago on HN.

    I love the visual interface of your version.

    There’s also a few things I love about an adjacent app (https://www.lifecalendar.io/) and I have a few feature requests for the back burner:

    1. I love the idea of seeing my entire life in one structured grid. We lose the playfulness of your version. But it is a harrowing reminder of how much time is left. Would it be possible to implement such a view?

    2. Filter/views for events types (vacations, career, etc) to change the perspective on specific topics.

    3. Empty headlines permitted. This would allow me to use this as a low resolution weekly journal, that shows the entries only on hover. If we want to warn users of actual empty headline mistakes, then we can substitute with a special character or the like.

  • by ks2048 on 3/1/25, 11:16 PM

    Nice Job! Editing "World Events" would be nice - perhaps just click on it to give option to delete. "SpaceX Landing" has nothing to do with my life.

  • by rishikeshs on 3/1/25, 10:21 PM

    Loved it! Is the code publicly available? When I built mine[1], I did the mistake of keeping each row as 26 weeks and 2 rows roughly as one year of life. This causes some rounding errors! Loved this design as its responsive.

    Question: The wider cells, do they represent one week and its simply wide just to fit in the text?

    [1] https://rishikeshs.com/timeline/

  • by ipaddr on 3/2/25, 4:14 AM

    Not sure why seeing a life like this makes me depressed

  • by gamerDude on 3/2/25, 1:52 PM

    I'd love to see more optionality in the events that shaped me.

    I loved that you made it easy to incorporate world events etc. And the general school calendar.

    It would be really nice to incorporate the world events in a list of select which ones made an impact in your life.

  • by c_biddlecombe on 2/26/25, 6:46 PM

    This is awesome. Can I embed this on my website?

  • by caitlinface on 3/1/25, 10:20 PM

    I really love that you can play around without creating an account. Kudos!

  • by dewey on 3/2/25, 12:02 PM

    I've built something in a similar direction but more around the places where I've been based on the EXIF data of my photo library.

    https://github.com/dewey/my-life-in-weeks

  • by varelaseb on 3/2/25, 3:28 AM

    Any thoughts on making this open source / open contribution? I know myself and apparently others here are very into this, but have some things we'd like to tweak! Like the ability to edit world events, for example.

  • by HermanMartinus on 3/2/25, 6:01 AM

    This is so cool! Always good to see projects like this on Hacker News.

  • by marconey on 3/2/25, 12:07 PM

    Reminded me of DateByDays, similar but the base unit is days instead of weeks

    https://datebydays.com/

  • by bonoboTP on 3/1/25, 11:24 PM

    It would be nice to have a choice of icons to select when adding an event. (Currently you have to insert an emoji, which is not so simple on desktop.)

  • by wnolens on 3/2/25, 2:54 PM

    Thanks for doing this. I bought the calendar over 10y ago and used it but threw it out in a move.

  • by apwell23 on 3/2/25, 6:03 PM

    this is awesome. I had the same idea when i saw that post.

    I would love to add links to media like pics, videos, notes ect.

  • by mips_avatar on 3/2/25, 3:54 AM

    starts rocking back and forth nervous at how few white blocks are left

  • by aiiizzz on 3/2/25, 11:06 AM

    Thanks but chatgpt can do this oneshot.