What can you find on Amelia Wattenberger's personal website?

Updated

Amelia Wattenberger's personal website at wattenberger.com is a working notebook rather than a finished portfolio. It collects her short thinking notes, a long archive of technical writing, and an ongoing list of experiments in AI interfaces, data visualization, and creative coding. The site itself is marked as a work in progress, with a link to an older version. If you want her polished, published work, start with the "Previous writings" section; if you want to see what she is currently exploring, read the thinking notes and project list.

Who she is

The site's opening line describes her as someone who creates things on the web, explores novel interfaces, turns data into meaning, and empowers developers with AI. It states she is currently a Principal Research Engineer on a small R&D team within GitHub, working on novel UIs and machine learning.

That framing explains the site's range: it is not a single-topic blog but a record of interface experiments, visualization work, and writing about how people think with software.

The four main sections

The homepage is organized into four labeled areas.

"I'm thinking about..."

A list of short, unfinished ideas rather than full articles. Examples from the site include:

  • "Chat is AI's command line."
  • "Code was our medium for thought"
  • "Our interfaces have lost their senses"
  • "Fish eye for text"
  • "LLMs as a tool for thought"
  • "The internet for the mind"
  • "Bridging the hard and the soft"
  • "Putting knowledge in its place"
  • "Evolving the infinite canvas"
  • "Getting creative with embeddings"
  • "Chatbots are not the future"

Treat these as prompts and theses she is developing, not conclusions. They are the fastest way to see what questions currently interest her.

"Previous writings"

A chronological archive of technical articles and tutorials. Topics include:

  • Combining React and D3
  • Using the d3 force
  • What does 100% mean in CSS?
  • Speeding up force simulations with spirals
  • How to create a Gauge component in React.js
  • The CSS Cascade
  • Scaling SVG Elements
  • Thinking in React Hooks
  • How to learn D3.js
  • Interactive Charts with D3.js

This is the most useful section if you are looking for practical front-end and data visualization guidance. Several of these are widely referenced introductions to D3 and React patterns.

"What I'm currently noodling on"

A project list with short descriptions, tagged by discipline (AI, data viz, design thoughts, JavaScript, SVG, lasers). Examples include:

  • A brainstorming tool for organizing your thoughts
  • An AI writing tool that helps you improve
  • An AI writing tool that helps you sculpt ideas like clay
  • An ode to infinite canvases, and how we can improve them
  • Combining text-to-image with data visualization
  • Moodboarding with Stable Diffusion
  • Generating images out of laser-cut kumiko patterns
  • Visualizing codebase changes over time
  • An educational tool for designing with SVGs
  • Visualizing time as a spiral
  • A personal dashboard for house hunting
  • Visualizing Stephen King books
  • Generating a font with text-to-image models
  • Generative 3D in the browser
  • Visualizing the state of APIs
  • Visualizing what JavaScript tools people use together
  • Exploring common structures for different JS frameworks
  • Helping people find fun datasets
  • Fullstack D3 and Data Visualization book & course

Some entries link to a "Read more" page; others are one-line descriptions of an experiment. The tags are a reliable signal of what each project involves.

"What I've been building at work"

A shorter section covering professional projects. The visible entry is Code Atlas, described as work on making LLM responses more robust and easier to understand.

How to use the site

If you want... Go to...
Practical tutorials on D3, React, CSS, or SVG Previous writings
A sense of her current research interests "I'm thinking about..."
Project ideas and experiments to explore "What I'm currently noodling on"
Her professional R&D work "What I've been building at work"
Her older, more complete site The "old one" link near the top

Things to know before browsing

  • The site is explicitly labeled as a work in progress, so some links and sections may be incomplete or change.
  • The thinking notes are fragments, not edited essays. Read them as working ideas.
  • Project entries vary in depth: some are full write-ups, others are single sentences.
  • The recurring themes across all sections are AI interfaces, data visualization, SVG, JavaScript tooling, and creative coding with tools like lasers and text-to-image models.