A registration page for my defence party, made with AI

It might not be the most obvious thing to include on a list of projects - after all, most people just handle this kind of thing with a Google Form. I, however, had some ideas about gathering social network data for arranging seating, as a fun little application of the kind of thing I did in the PhD. That, of course, is not possible with just a Google Form.

So it turned into an interesting challenge of figuring out web hosting, how Cloudflare works, and most importantly how to use AI to write an entire project in a programming language I don’t speak - the entire thing is in TypeScript, which you certainly don’t learn in a maths PhD.

The fact that this was possible is, I think, a sign of the general usefulness of one of the more underappreciated skills mathematics teaches you: Black-boxing everything you don’t understand and still creating a working new thing. Using a theorem from a paper you never read isn’t that much different from using AI to write code where you only understand the big picture, not the details.

The page is running as a demo version here, and the code is available on GitHub.