What is Nearby?

Nearby is a web app that fetches your current location and shows all the upcoming busses near your current location in Winnipeg.

The tech behind Nearby

Nearby is written entirely using Next.js. Using the Geolocation API built in to most web browsers in use today such as Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, a web app that quickly shows when the next bus comes in an instant is very useful for bus stops without a real time information screen or unreliable apps that do not show delays like Google Maps. Nearby was also completely styled in Tailwind CSS.

Problems that had to be solved

Next.js tends to cache its API calls for faster rendering but as Nearby is an app that constantly needs to fetch information, it was very important to add cache busting mechanisms such as a datetime object to the API call as well as ensuring the cache gets cleared every few moments. This does not however make the app any slower as it still remains very lightweight.

Future rewrite?

SvelteKit has been a blast to use, and I have considered rewriting Nearby in SvelteKit to see the differences in development time and ease of use. I would consider myself a much better React dev than Svelte but seeing as Svelte 5 has released recently I figured I might give it a shot.

This portfolio website has been entirely written in SvelteKit 5 and it has been a different more fun experience to write.