This is the first post about one of my side projects. This project is my most personal one to date: I am working on it alone, and its primary goal isn't profitability. I want to measure its success by its utility and its low maintenance cost.
I have lived in Paris for over six years now, and I’ve taken full advantage of the many swimming pools available in the capital. The city has about 46 municipal pools! The entry fee is very affordable (averaging €3.50) with convenient opening hours (from 7:00 AM to 11:30 PM). I’ve rediscovered my love for swimming thanks to them.
The problem: every pool has its own specific schedule, and I always need to know which one is the closest to my current location.
"What if I created a bot where I could send my location, and it would return the nearest pool with opening hours that account for travel time and a 45-minute swim session?"
I will be writing a series of articles to present the progress of this project. Here are the initial technical leads:
Paris Open Data: Pool info and schedules
Navitia API: Public transport route calculation
Python-telegram-bot: User interface
Hosting: €6/year NAT VPS (256MB RAM)
Using a VPS with very low specs (256MB RAM) is a deliberate challenge to optimize my stack and my code. The goal is to deliver an API that doesn't use any AI, for reasons of both cost and reliability.
In the next article, I will detail my choices for the stack and the specificities of swimming pools in Paris.