The door only opens one way

US Social Security Administration, national baby-name applications · public domain (CC0 1.0 via data.gov) · 1880–2025 · 105,966 names · 375,362,447 births

Three datasets, and only two are fetched when the page opens. The story is told from 62 KB; the 2.1 MB name table that answers "what about my name?" is requested the first time a reader asks and never otherwise.

A dashboard titled "The door only opens one way". A line chart spanning 1880 to 2025 plots, for each of twenty-four first names, the share of babies given it who were girls: twenty-three amber lines climb from near 0% to near 100%, and one blue line rides above 75% for decades before falling off a cliff to 5% after 2012. Three statistic cards read 23 names crossed from boys to girls, 1 crossed the other way, and 1,823 names were eligible to be tested. Below, a grid of twenty-four small sparkline cards, one per name, labelled with the year each turned — Shelby 1936 through Kyrie 2012. Then two segmented controls over a six-by-four table showing the same test run at twenty-four different strictness settings, every cell printing a boys-to-girls count beside a girls-to-boys count, and a paired bar chart. Last, a text box where a reader types a name, showing Ashley rising from 0% to 99% girls with its annual birth totals ghosted behind the line.

A screenshot of the published dashboard, captured from the same URL anybody can open.

Data lane: Query lane
Per view: 2181.5 KB fetched, 3 extract
Data age: as of 2025-01-01
Reachability: opens with no account

Measured against the live host, with no credential, on 2026-10-09.

The question it answers

A name can stop being a boy’s name and become a girl’s name. How often does it go back the other way?

The data, and over what period

US Social Security baby names, 1880–2025.

How it gets its rows

Three queries, in your browser, with no key. The 2 MB name table is fetched only when you type a name.

What comes back

97% of the data sits behind a question most readers never ask.

What was hard

“Crossed” needs a popularity floor, a window and two share bands, and one flattering choice looks exactly like a result. So the test runs at 24 settings and all 24 are published: boys-to-girls wins every one, and girls-to-boys is zero in nine.

What happened after the build

Frozen. The SSA publishes once a year.

The dashboard itself

Open the live dashboard

Still image

The live dashboard loads from the viewer host. Nothing is fetched from it until you ask, so this page does not touch that origin unless you want it to.

https://share.vibedasher.com/eu/vibedasher/the-door-only-opens-one-way?exec=wasm

What loads here is the published dashboard, from the same address anybody else would open — not a copy kept by hand. The still above it is a screenshot of that same address.

Published by Vibedasher