stemformulas.com

Introduction #

stemformulas.com is a site that I developed (with a bit of help) and currently maintain.

I want to make it take seconds to find the formula you know is out there on the internet, rather than a minute of scrolling through Google results, images, and textbooks.

Implementation #

I flip flopped on how to achieve this. I started with a React implementation, switched to a Ruby on Rails after picking it up at Shopify, but both of those still had to steep a learning curve. I briefly considered using Flask and Python, but finally I settled on Hugo and went all the way with it, with some web dev help from my friends.

The technical portions of it were also so much fun to work on, because I’ve never really taken a dedicated course for web development; I learned HTML off the cuff very slowly, I learned some JavaScript in high school but never touched it again, and I learned CSS in hacky ways with a Python package called Streamlit, and the amalgamation of all of these small experiences led to me being just competent enough to make stemformulas.com and make it well.

Conclusion #

I’m so proud of what I made on stemformulas.com, it looks modern, it’s fast, and I use it all the time whenver I forget a formula. The site has seen more than 8000 unique users, and I’m confident that if I keep adding features, it’ll see even more.

The main feature I want to add still is the ability to create formula sheets that can be shared, edited, remixed etc.