Pike: To Exit or Not to Exit

3 days ago

Pike is an app designed to solve the problem of choosing the right exit during road trips by providing easy-to-view exit cards with options within 5 minutes of driving time.
Current navigation apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps are not optimized for road trips as they don't effectively show options that are quickly accessible from upcoming exits.
The app is particularly useful for travelers who want to avoid missing key stops like the last Chick-fil-A for hundreds of miles or need to find dog parks for pets.
Development involved multiple iterations, starting with flawed approaches like directional POIs and non-directed graphs, before settling on pre-computed exit sequences and driving time searches.
The final solution used OpenStreetMap data and Open Source Routing Machine to pre-compute driving times from exits to POIs across the continental US, requiring significant cloud computing resources.
The creator learned valuable lessons about avoiding heuristics in map-based applications and the importance of clean data.
Future updates may include configurable timing for POI recommendations and additional categories like parks and dog parks.

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