My content management system is an Excel spreadsheet
June 15, 2026 nyc building design decisions
I made a site that answers one question: where's bar trivia tonight in New York? About 150 bars, filterable by day, neighborhood, and time.
The architecture would make an enterprise architect cry. There's one HTML file. The data lives inside it. When the listings change, a small script swaps in the new data, and that's the whole deployment. The source of truth for all of it is an Excel workbook.
Why I'm not embarrassed about this
- The data barely changes. Trivia nights are weekly rituals. A database would be a lot of machinery for information that updates a few times a month.
- A spreadsheet is a great editor. I can fix a listing from my phone, sort by neighborhood, and eyeball the whole dataset at once. Building an admin panel would have taken longer than curating the actual list.
- The site is instant. No loading spinner, no API call, no database to fall over on a Friday night when everyone's deciding where to go. The page arrives already knowing everything.
The general principle
I build a lot of things now, some of them fairly involved. The trivia site keeps me honest, because it proves the other direction: complexity should be earned by the problem, not by the builder's ego. When I'm tempted to add a database, a framework, or a service, I try to ask what the spreadsheet version would look like first.
Sometimes the answer really is a platform. Sometimes it's one file and a list you tend by hand, like a garden.
Also, if your trivia night isn't listed, tell me. The spreadsheet awaits.