This was/is a passion project; it's now a directory/web crawler of 958+ makers (artisans, craftspeople, smiths, authors), focusing on interesting people building interesting things around the world.
TECH STACK: Selenium/Chrome drive the 'WOBBOT' crawler, with some SerpAPI, Pyton/bs4/html5lib/pillow/spaCy does named-entity extraction, some docling, and DeepSeek v3/v4 (with Ollama/qwen3:4b/gemma4:26b) used for evaluations and enrichments, reducing 10K sites -> 7K identified profiles -> 3K enriched -> 900+ 'vetted' (10 console workers). Web app is React on Amplify/Lambda on AWS (one day I'd love Apache Nutch/StormCrawler and a real SE, e.g. Solr).
I built it because:
1) I needed to break out of the SWE bubble I'm in (yes I see the irony)
2) to connect with more people doing interesting things
3) to indirectly brainstorm post-AI ideas/skills
World of Builders was 'Freelance Ireland' circa 2000, but over the years I have redesigned/recoded and I think I'm going to prioritise finding builders with their own websites; my thinking is there's more flavour on the internet beyond GPT and Google Search. I'd also love to do more interview-style content, with a strong focus on 'origin stories', i.e. how someone initially got started instead of their latest and greatest thing.
Would love to interview YOU if you think you have a suitable origin story, just email me shane@worldofbuilders.com
Most of them have an istagram page, it would be nice to add a few of their photos to their profilesand the short version on the main page.
That’s a good point actually ie. Their public profiles (i was worried if i just used photos on their website, but yes most would have x/insta)
Do they create their profiles or you created all of them? I'm not sure about the permision to reuse photos from x/insta.
This was/is a passion project; it's now a directory/web crawler of 958+ makers (artisans, craftspeople, smiths, authors), focusing on interesting people building interesting things around the world.
TECH STACK: Selenium/Chrome drive the 'WOBBOT' crawler, with some SerpAPI, Pyton/bs4/html5lib/pillow/spaCy does named-entity extraction, some docling, and DeepSeek v3/v4 (with Ollama/qwen3:4b/gemma4:26b) used for evaluations and enrichments, reducing 10K sites -> 7K identified profiles -> 3K enriched -> 900+ 'vetted' (10 console workers). Web app is React on Amplify/Lambda on AWS (one day I'd love Apache Nutch/StormCrawler and a real SE, e.g. Solr).
I built it because: 1) I needed to break out of the SWE bubble I'm in (yes I see the irony) 2) to connect with more people doing interesting things 3) to indirectly brainstorm post-AI ideas/skills
World of Builders was 'Freelance Ireland' circa 2000, but over the years I have redesigned/recoded and I think I'm going to prioritise finding builders with their own websites; my thinking is there's more flavour on the internet beyond GPT and Google Search. I'd also love to do more interview-style content, with a strong focus on 'origin stories', i.e. how someone initially got started instead of their latest and greatest thing.
Would love to interview YOU if you think you have a suitable origin story, just email me shane@worldofbuilders.com
If you have a website you want indexed, add it at https://www.worldofbuilders.com/add-url/
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy WOB Shane shane@worldofbuilders.com