FiveFootShelf

Several years ago, I built an app that would let anyone subscribe to "playlists of books" — basically, a syllabus.

The lists were adapted from the Great Books of the Western World list, along with some other similar lists. You could read along with lists of great science fiction, famous Latin American authors, foundational works of philosophy, etc.

The app was called FiveFootShelf, named after the proverbial "five foot shelf" that a former Harvard president claimed you could fit all the books on to give yourself a solid self-education.

The app was written in Meteor, back when that was popular — it was an isomorphic JS app, meaning that the same code ran the front-end and the back-end.

I tried to find some screenshots or code, but I couldn't. As far as I know, this slide from a presentation I gave is the last remaining image of FiveFootShelf.

The app is on the left, with dev tools open and Sublime Text on the right. Not sure what I was talking about when this slide was presented.