kdeorah

Congrats on the call out by Point Free, authors of the functional architecture you are using. https://twitter.com/pointfreeco/status/1266397563004915712

Bike-pooling and carpooling are taking off quite a bit in Asia (at the expense of Uber). Scooters and bikes are doing well in US and EU. There are more apps to be built for sure... It's the beginning, not the end.

How do you calculate ETAs? Do you use Google Maps?

1. You don’t have to pay Google :-) 2. Google packages the on-device navigation and places experience for ridesharing, while this repo is focused on the location tracking aspect and how that experience is managed in the cloud.

ah that's interesting. we've seen that sales people don't like being tracked, they like to perform. service teams on the other hand like stuff being automated and get more efficient. thanks for the insight though.

most unexpected i have seen is volunteers on election day visiting polling booths through the day.

@kishanht ridesharing is a relatable metaphor for any two sided network with moving supply on one side, being matched with dynamic demand on the other.

@Charles_tse thanks for going through the Github repos. this is indeed a generic on-demand platform kickstarter.

good question, main goal was to get the project up and running quickly. guess for the frontend there's less need for it. the backend project uses localtunnel to consume webhooks while testing locally. ngrok looks great!

Yes you could use MapTiler or Mapbox or a React component for any other map. Google is most popular and therefore added to sample.

Heroku is the easiest to get up and running with. PaaS over raw store/compute when you are getting started.

Smartphone is where the work app sits. Making the app location aware serves a diff need than vehicle connected telematics. The worlds converge a bit but tandem is more the norm than replacement.

Yes look us up here: https://github.com/hypertrack

Does Uber track the ride or the driver? App users are carrying out work and the business wants to track work. Asset track and telematics are product categories used in the industry where work is on the move. This app belongs in the same bucket.

We built this app to dogfood our location tracking platform. Places visited, commutes taken, walks to lunches, drives to meetings … really the timeline of movement from place to place. In the end, we had built a number of useful backend libraries in NodeJS and frontend libraries in NextJS. Sharing that out to re-use and re-purpose.

Agree that serverless is a buzzword here, just as data science and machine learning have now become. It is about taming greater complexity at lower cost, and at increasingly more granular levels.

Not using EC2 directly, though AWS breaks that down cost with a line item for EC2.

Many tables in DynamoDB. Two out of those are most used (equally).

That's exactly right. Background location tracking leads to constant traffic. Not running into cold starts as an issue.

Top 3 are EC2, DynamoDB and Lambda.

We haven't hit any scaling issues yet. GraphQL is nice. It's really about getting data directly from DynamoDB and Aurora to an end point that Android/iOS/React-JS can query and subscribe to. Apache Velocity Template Language that AppSync uses is a pain though. This post captures it well (unfortunately): https://www.reddit.com/r/graphql/comments/b0zomv/aws_appsync...

Ah yes. The engineer would tell you we can move when we want. The manager would tell you it is harder than it looks. Management would tell you it will never happen. :-)

See it as reducing startup risk and deferring the payment to when you become successful and have money/time to throw at problem. Though there are best practices to do it in a clean way so moving is easier.

Do you know some known gotchas here?

Good question. At 100x, probably not. At 10x, yes would be better than managing services on our own. By that time, we would have a better prioritized list of which services to self-manage and which ones to leave to AWS. Are you specifically concerned about DynamoDB for some reason?

Coming up in part 4 of the movement series. Will be a post dedicated to battery drain for movement tracking.

Hey Egbert, found your post useful. I have worked with the good folks at Stripe Connect as an early user (Pay with OpenTable). The Uber-for-X in a day package makes a ton of sense. Needs location, messaging, payments, perhaps an order management framework. What could the next steps be to put this together?

Ouch! A recent content reorg led to the trailing html getting nuked. Use this: https://www.hypertrack.com/faq. Fixing it on the blog... Thanks.

Yea sure is. There is only so much of the world that Uber will capture even as the largest in the space. For everything else, the world would need a way to use a location stack that can compete with the might of Uber, no?

Thanks Chris. This is Kashyap, HyperTrack's founder/ceo. Your work with Uber APIs and Trip Experiences was awesome and remains an inspiration. I would love to see an integration between HyperTrack and Trip Experiences.

When we started, we imagined that apps for work would find us most useful. We have been surprised with the number of apps for consumers who tinker with our stack for building live location sharing and geofencing use cases. For example, a messaging app used us so groups that were meeting up (for beer, say) could track each other in the same map fragment. Another developer used us to profile the places (bars, say) where a user's social graph hangs out. They used it to make better recommendations. Do you think stuff like that has room to grow?

Thanks for the feedback. I am the HyperTrack founder. The customer you are referring to is still using us and volumes are growing. We pushed out a major re-architecture in March 2017. The release added a key dimension to the accuracy model - activity. Activity is computed based on non-location sensors on the device - accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, pedometer, etc. Please give us another shot with your new employer and tell us what you think.

Uber-for-X and on-demand have become bad words just like ecommerce and dot com did in 2000/01. We are long on the Uberification of every industry out there. And are seeing forward thinking companies of all shapes and sizes use the power of the smartphone location/activity to build awesome features to grow revenues and reduce costs.