Origin Story
I started thinking about how many people were alive and where I would most likely be born had I been born today. Then the thought struck me, wouldn't it be interesting to turn this into a site? With the click of a button you would give birth to a baby boy/girl and see where it was born.
After having the idea for a little while, I finally found the time to work on it. I first did research, trying to find real world statistics of the population and birth rate of each country. As it turns out,
this information is publicly available! I used the data from 2015, which were the latest available numbers at the time.
Cool, now we know the birth rate. What now? As the birth rate is per 1,000 people, we can use the population count to get an indication on how many babies are expected to be born that year in a given country. There's several approaches to this, for example
((birth rate/1000)*population)
. After doing that I had to dive into SQL, which I had not much prior experience with. The end result may be a bit silly, but the learning experience and fun I had while working on it was well worth the effort.
During development, the ideas of being able to trade babies or having a working infant mortality rate were things I considered. I did not end up implementing these, as I did not feel like soliciting in human trafficking or being responsible for the death of virtual infants. You can
find past versions of this project here.