Travel Pam

Personal travel archive + playground for design, code, and AI. After years of working around no-code limitations, I wanted to see what would happen if I just built the thing I actually wanted.

My role
Designer + Builder
Project type
Long-term side quest
Collaborators
Just me :) + a lot of AI
Date & place
2026 — ongoing

About Project

What if I build one place for all the stories, photos, and random things I collect while travelling?

I kept hitting the ceiling of no-code

I’ve been building websites with tools like Framer for a while. They’re great when I want to get something online quickly — until I want to do something the tool wasn’t really designed for.

Custom interactions became workarounds. Content had to fit the CMS. Sometimes I’d spend more time figuring out how to hack around a limitation than actually designing the thing.

I realised I was asking

“Can Framer do this?” instead of “What do I actually want to build?”

So I tried building without it. ↓

Reflections…

What building TravelPam taught me

Constraints can quietly shape the idea itself

Working with no-code tools taught me that limitations don’t just affect implementation — they can start influencing what I’m willing to imagine in the first place. TravelPam made me more conscious of when I’m simplifying an idea for good reasons, versus when I’m simply designing around what a tool allows.

AI makes building easier, but clarity matters more

The coding became surprisingly manageable once the models had enough context. The harder part was defining what I actually wanted, structuring the problem clearly, and knowing when an implementation was good enough. AI removed a lot of the technical friction, but it made judgment and direction even more important.

Shipping gave me more clarity than polishing

I could have spent months trying to find the perfect visual language or architecture. Building a version, putting real content into it, and seeing what felt wrong taught me much faster. I’m starting to see TravelPam less as a finished website and more as something that will keep evolving with me.

I don’t need to become an engineer to build ambitious things

I still don’t want to be the person writing every line of code from scratch. What interests me more is understanding enough of the system to make good decisions, communicate intent, debug problems, and push an idea further than I could with design tools alone.

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