Place

Place is the WHEN engine — a perishable-decision-window company. Every incumbent answers where: find the place, get to the place, book the place. Place answers when. Its primary object is the window — the minus tide that exposes the Haystack pools, the first larch weekend, the campsite cancellation at a full campground, the first smoke-free morning — each bound to an executable condition predicate over free public sensor feeds (USGS streamflow, NOAA tides, space weather, Recreation.gov availability, AirNow) with verified local thresholds that appear in no corpus. Users browse the Almanac — the per-metro catalog of watchable moments — tap Watch, and a watcher (a standing query, re-evaluated on every sweep) pushes the moment the window opens. Outdoors is window family #1 of six, and the everyday screen it powers is still the one no incumbent can render: "What's good right now, near you."

Start here

The strategy and development canon lives in docs/ — docs/00 through docs/10 — read docs/00-THESIS.md first. The canon commits the decisions (thesis, graph ontology, product loop, data strategy, architecture, roadmap, competitive position, the window-family doctrine, the Almanac, Groundwire); new work should extend them, not re-derive them.

Current state of the code

backend/ implements the architecture in docs/04-ARCHITECTURE.md through the temporal-feed milestone (PR-1 to PR-7 of its migration sequence): Postgres 16 + PostGIS + pgvector, the full experience-graph schema, the condition evaluator with live adapters (USGS NWIS, Open-Meteo/NWS, NOAA CO-OPS, SNOTEL, NWAC, AirNow, sun/moon), Overpass/GNIS/RIDB/USFS ingestion, the launch bindings, the FastAPI surface (feed, places, saves, trips, verdicts, magic-link auth, admin review queue), and the key-gated extraction pipeline. The original Mongo seed (src/) is replaced.

make db-up      # Postgres (PostGIS + pgvector) via docker compose, port 5433
make migrate    # Alembic baseline
make seed       # Overpass + GNIS skeleton places (keyless, live APIs)
cd backend && .venv/bin/python -m place.ingest.cli bindings   # launch bindings
make evaluate   # one live evaluator sweep -> good_now
make api        # FastAPI on :8000  ->  GET /feed?lat=45.512&lng=-122.658
make test       # pytest (unit + integration; live tests: pytest -m live)

Runs end to end with zero credentials — every live feed is a free public API. Optional keys (Anthropic extraction, Reddit corpus, RIDB, AirNow, Resend email, Sentry) are documented in .env.example; copy it to .env and fill what you need.