Interesting, was actually planning on setting up a carshare for our cul-de-sac in Honolulu. This is a great reference, thanks for sharing.
Glad to hear. Hey, if you want to use/try out the app, hit me up: my username @ Gmail.
OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#32wow... so much yak shaving, including priceless bits like "sat with ChatGPT for a bit [...] we came up with OurCar" (I mean... how original is that, clearly powerful datacenters computing over a dump of the Internet was needed), I'm impressed. All this to avoid doing one subtraction (km before, km now) then multiplication (result times average litter/km) in your head. That's a LOT of effort to be lazy.
Haha, that's certainly one way to see it. I really enjoyed making the app, so it was less about laziness more about an itchy trigger finger.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#33wow... so much yak shaving, including priceless bits like "sat with ChatGPT for a bit [...] we came up with OurCar" (I mean... how original is that, clearly powerful datacenters computing over a dump of the Internet was needed), I'm impressed. All this to avoid doing one subtraction (km before, km now) then multiplication (result times average litter/km) in your head. That's a LOT of effort to be lazy.
My ex isn't good with numbers but nevertheless she has a master in education. She has helped many, many children with learning deficiencies. For lots of people, the math is a significant barrier.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#34Integrate an OBDii dongle with Bluetooth and have the app read it from there.
It's not a bad idea, but everything I know about those days they are not fun to work with, and I didn't have one anyway.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#35Fun project. The article is a bit light on details. I find it astonishing that a project like this runs into performance issues. I would have liked to learn more about what these resource-constrained widgets looked like, what they did, and what caused the performance issues.
Agreed. Perhaps I'll write a follow up that talks about the actual technical details more. I didn't want to lose sight of the story by getting bogged down in the technical details too much, but there are so many good little technical bits to share.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW if I were to do this I'd do echo > index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free! For the fancy version I'd make priceperlitterperkm URL parameter to make it work not just for my area. But that's like an entire additional like of code. My point being... I'd make a Web page, on app, no deployment, no tracking.
echo > index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free! You are conveniently leaving out that you already must have: * a server running 24/7 on the internet, paid for each month * purchased, setup and keep paying every year a domain name * configured a web server in that server, ideally with automated SSL certificate issue and renewal
Or just use GitHub pages.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#37Clearly the car was the Top Gear KIA Cee'd and you must be The Stig.
We all start pet projects with the tools we know, to learn new tools along the way. Sometimes you have a nail and the hammer is the right tool for the job. However, why use just the hammer when you can just download the whole Snap On tool inventory for the same price, in both metric and weird American units?
From your write up, I felt that the frameworks were not helping. A HTML file served as a PWA would provide everything needed, without the need to go through the hoops of app stores and debugging with those fancy AI things. To open the page an NFC sticker in the car could work.
What I am saying is 'Keep It Simple'. Oh, and get a bicycle! Most of the world uses 'active travel' for most journeys, only in America is 'active travel' effectively banned by zoning laws and whatnot. Maybe v2 of the app could be all about car dependency, which should be regarded as a chronic disease, with some of the methods used by 'quit smoking' apps to keep users motivated to ride a bicycle or walk, rather than get in the tin coffin.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#38Plenty of comments about using an LLM to assist with this, and I was happy to be able to read about a learning experience where the stakes were pretty low and the feedback loop pretty tight. Thanks for writing it up; for me, it reminds me that some of the use cases where an LLM might be an efficient tool are also the places where it can be wise to take the opportunity to learn and sharpen new skills.
I totally agree. Don't get me wrong, LLMs helped a lot here, Copilot has been my trusty tool from the day it hit the market, But agents were not really a thing then.
In general, my policy is to do it myself until it stops being fun, so as long as stuff doesn't feel like a slog, I'm still pretty productive all on my own.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#39wow... so much yak shaving, including priceless bits like "sat with ChatGPT for a bit [...] we came up with OurCar" (I mean... how original is that, clearly powerful datacenters computing over a dump of the Internet was needed), I'm impressed. All this to avoid doing one subtraction (km before, km now) then multiplication (result times average litter/km) in your head. That's a LOT of effort to be lazy.
FWIW if I were to do this I'd do echo > index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free! For the fancy version I'd make priceperlitterperkm URL parameter to make it work not just for my area. But that's like an entire additional like of code. My point being... I'd make a Web page, on app, no deployment, no tracking.
The article mentions that was proposed and no one wanted to do it.
Also, alerts are terrible UX. At least put some effort into your example.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#40Hi HN!
OP here. This is my first post and I'm very grateful to see it on the front page. This app was a lot of fun to build, and I really enjoyed putting together the writeup. I've been very inspired by the other stories shared here to write my own, so seeing the comments has been very validating.
I guess I'll be around answering questions and comments as I see them. Thanks for reading and responding.