I wanted a faster, easier mapping app to plan motorcycle rides for myself and with groups, so I finally bit the bullet and started building my own at the beginning of this year.

I got to the MVP state which was useful for my personal use case in about a month. I took it further than that as a learning exercise and as a means to share it with others. Some features that came later are live cursors (like Figma), elevation chart and grade overlay, and QR-code enabled collaboration links to make in-person sharing simple.

Check it out! https://plotalong.app

Figuring out the exact UI/UX I wanted was the hardest part. I did the branding myself, handdrawn on paper, traced in Procreate, and vectored in Sketch. Fast iterations and a good test suite made it possible to try lots of different approaches and refine the one I liked the most. There are roughly 4000 unit tests and over 300 e2e tests that run on multiple environments with fully automated CI/CD.

I’m using Mapbox for the frontend and the whole app is basically just a monolithic Cloudflare Worker. Claude pretty much implemented the entire thing. I got a lot of mileage out of self hosting a Gitea project and recording all my planning sessions as Milestones and Issues. Claude has his own account without admin privileges. The process of managing a team of agents to build this practically autonomously was a bit jaw dropping and eye opening to be honest.

I would love to hear from other pleasure & sport drivers about the features they use or want the most in a routing app. I have an Android app in Play Store review, if you’d like to be an early access tester shoot me an email at my handle @plotalong.app

Very nice! Does the sharing feature allow live location sharing? That seems like it would help a lot, especially when group members are in separate vehicles.

No, and while that does sound like a pretty obvious feature I should clarify the app is about planning, not turn-by-turn directions. You can open Plot Along routes in Google Maps, Apple Maps, multiple GPS formats and more

The idea is everyone opens the same route for coordinating and there’s just one source of truth for the group. And then when you’re all about to hit the road, everyone can use the nav app they’re already familiar with (or that’s built into their vehicle)

I will tackle the navigation aspect at some point if I do keep up on feature dev, though!

I understand the need for this and like what youre doing. Ive tried to look before for a good app for this ans always been disappointed. I like the way you've deferred the map direction call so moving a pin around doesnt feel sluggish like other apps Ive used.

Suggestion if youre open to it: emoji or text badges for each stop (e.g., or )

I also think itd be helpful to have route leg times shown directly on the map as popout tooltips. Knowing stop 2 to 3 is five hours is critical, and how we plan.

Suggestion for your pay model: I think it would be lovely to be able to use this with no option to save. Or, maybe a single fee for an administrator that allows up to x users for one month with only one routr? I only do these kinds of trips yearly, so a monthly fee for three collaborators just wouldn't work. Would we all sign up then disable our accounts? Its hard to imagine that model working for me (RV road tripper with 3-4 people) I think Id be willing to pay the $5/pp that allowed me and x friends to all jump in. Having each person set up their own paid account feels like a harder sell.

Thanks for the feedback. As it is right now, only one person needs to subscribe in order to collaborate. I’ll definitely make that clearer in the marketing material!

I like your emoji suggestion. I realized little while ago I need to distinguish between different types of waypoints so this is great validation

I think you’re right about getting people into the actual app faster, before signup. I’ll have to prioritize that sooner than later

Brilliant! I definitely felt the lack of appropriate solutions.

you can tap the Share button and use Add to Home Screen on any website in iOS Safari, including PWAs. it even works on hn

I've worked with some people who only seem to care about 2. as in, they don't try the feature in any way, but come back with comments about "this isn't tested enough" even though it has higher coverage than the codebase's average, and refuse to approve even though they'll never meaningfully review the content. it does seem to be mostly just theater in my experience

I have to agree with OP, in my experience it is usually more productive to start over than to try correcting output early on. deeper into a project and it gets a bit harder to pull off a switch. I sometimes fork my chats before attempting to make a correction so that I can resume the original just in case (yes, I know you can double-tap Esc but the restoration has failed for me a few times in the past and now I generally avoid it)

this was addressed directly in TFA with a link to https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.03824-24

if you live in the PNW and would like to see some world class bonsai in person, the Pacific Bonsai Museum in Federal Way is a great destination. this time of year is also good for visiting the neighboring rhododendron and azalea garden

thanks for sharing your project. how was your process different compared to pre-claude design? would you use it again?

this is not true in my experience. prefab kits of all sizes (from sheds to houses to barns, like were once possible to order from a Sears catalog) have worse tolerances than a carpenter working on site. you can measure 3 times and cut perfectly, and still end up with a few mm gap (or sometimes worse) after tiny errors accumulate as you assemble piece after piece. it _requires_ measuring as you go and cutting on site to handle this small amount of drift and to really produce something of high quality. it doesn't come in a box

Correct about large scale kits. I had meant to head off the fact that preassembled pieces like windows have improved a lot, things that used to be assembled on-site but are now delivered as a unit or small kit.

Darktable has really improved over the last couple years. It used to have some pretty confusing workflows and lots of overlapping modules, but somehow it's been getting cleaned up and polished into something of an intuitive app. It is still different but not so overwhelmed with features that you can't figure it out