Behind the Scenes

About This Site

A personal multi-trip planner, built entirely through conversation with AI.

What is this?

Mariatta Travels is a personal site that collects Mariatta's trip plans — family vacations and conference trips — each with its own itinerary, hotel and restaurant recommendations, interactive maps, budget, planning checklist, and expense log.

It currently houses 5 trips. Each lives at its own URL (e.g. /portugal-2026/) but shares the same layout, components, and data shapes. Adding a new trip is mostly a matter of dropping a new config and data files into src/trips/<slug>/.

It is not a commercial travel guide or affiliate site.

100% generated by Claude

Every line of code, every data file, every component, and every piece of content on this site was generated by Claude Code (Anthropic's AI coding assistant) through conversational prompting. No code was written by hand.

The architecture — an Astro static site with a per-trip config, a shared TripLayout, pluggable sections for different trip types (family multi-city vs single-city conference), breadcrumbs, and prev/next trip navigation — was chosen and implemented entirely by Claude based on the requirements described in conversation.

From a single trip to a monorepo

This site started as the Portugal trip planner — a standalone repo for one family trip. As more trips came up (Taiwan, LinuxFest Northwest, the Python Core Dev Sprint), the "one repo per trip" pattern didn't scale. This monorepo was built through another conversation with Claude to share layout, components, and data schema across every trip, with a hub page indexing them all.

Trip statuses

Not every planned trip ends up happening. Each trip on the hub is tagged with one of:

  • Planning — still an idea, possibly not happening
  • Confirmed — booked, going ahead
  • Completed — trip happened (auto-derived from the end date)
  • Not taken — decided not to do it (budget, scheduling, life)

Blog posts about this project

Mariatta has written about the process of building these trip planners with AI:

Tools used

  • Claude Code — AI coding assistant by Anthropic, used for all code generation, web research, and content writing
  • Astro — static site framework
  • Leaflet + OpenStreetMap — interactive maps
  • GitHub Pages — hosting