Willie

What it does

Willie is a recommendation engine for the Dutch wine retailer wijnboodschap.nl. Given a customer's order history, it surfaces wines they will probably like — but with explanations the customer can read out loud:

• Geographic match — same region or sub-region as a wine they bought before.
• Vintage year overlap — birth years, anniversaries, milestone years.
• Name overlap — playful matches based on shared words or themes.

Each recommendation comes with a one-sentence reason — no opaque "because the algorithm said so."

Architecture

• BigQuery + dbt — the wine catalogue and order history live in BigQuery. dbt transforms them into the feature tables Willie reads.
• Python / Flask backend — small API that serves recommendations.
• Static front-end — embeds into the wijnboodschap.nl site.

Status

In dev. The backbone (BigQuery + dbt) is up; the front-end embed is the active build target.