Mike's List

Bay Area Show Explorer started from a familiar local-discovery problem: concert listings are useful, but they are thin. They tell you what is happening, but they often do not explain who the artist is, whether they are local, where to support them, or how trustworthy the imported data is.

The project became more interesting when I stopped thinking of it as only a calendar and started thinking of it as a review workflow. The app separates artists, venues, and events into different data concerns. A show listing can point to an event, but artist and venue records can carry richer context, source links, enrichment notes, and review states.

Instead of treating imported listings as finished truth, Bay Area Show Explorer treats them as leads. Records can be enriched, reviewed, and kept traceable back to sources. That creates a more careful discovery experience: automated where automation helps, but still honest about uncertainty.

The hardest challenge has been ambiguity. Artist names collide. Venue data can be incomplete. Search results can look plausible and still be wrong. The app has to make room for unresolved matches rather than pretending every enrichment step is certain.