Introducing Novelty

Hello all,

I've been working on a project for much of 2021, which has culminated in a live website novelty-insights.com. I intend it to be a website that allows for personal data exploration, where your data is used not to sell you targeted ads but for you to better understand your habits and blind spots.

My main job is as a Data Scientist / Product Manager. For most of this year, this has been an after work side hobby, but I also spent 4 months of this year unemployed and focused mainly on it, including hiring a contractor on upwork.com to help me build out a skeleton website. Through his help, and then me banging my head through Django errors, AWS Lightsail documentation and database migration hell, I have the website running live, with a lot of navigability and performance issues.

Although I ultimately want to explore many "data domains", such as one's travel history, music streaming, video streaming and exercises, I have focused initially on reading (hence the Novelty name). Specifically, I have leveraged the Goodreads website, which allows you to indicate a library of your read books and allows you to export your library with some available data. I've written code to scrape more data, including the genders and nationalities of the authors and the popularity of the books, and present it back to the user in graphs.

I mainly want this to be cool. Making these graphs on my own data has been super enjoyable for me, and I hope others are able to find the service interesting and valuable. On the dozens of friends whom I performed this analysis on ("manually", before the website was up), about a third of them didn't find it interesting, a third of them were mildly intrigued, and a third of them attentive users.

Please let me know if you have feedback or questions! I've gained a lot of inspiration from Indie Hackers on this journey.