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RoadHunters.io - brings motorcyclists around the world

Hello everyone, my name is Sergey and I have been riding a motorcycle for more than 7 years. Now, of course, not the best situation in the world and our country in particular for our service, however, we started developing it in 2018, when we did not even suspect the future.

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RoadHunters is a geolocation service for finding routes and creating motorcycle events , we want to bring motorcyclists around the world together and allow them to share experience and knowledge with each other.
(So ​​far, the service works only on a PC)

First, some information on how it works, and a little lower will be “under the soot” of the portal.
How often this happens, the idea of ​​creating a service is a solution to the personal problem that the creators face. We are with666granikwere no exception.

I don’t know whether there are many among motorcyclists reading, so I’ll talk a little about these pains:

  1. Find someone to ride with. Moreover, a similar level of skiing, similar technology and territorial proximity is desirable.
  2. . . , .
  3. . , : , , . — .

Thus, we started developing the RoadHunters.io service .
The portal is free to use, and is suitable not only for motorcyclists, although it is focused on them in the first place.

In childhood, like many, we spent hours in a series of GTA and NFS Underground 1-2 games, and we wanted to transfer a piece of this world to “ours”. We added upcoming events, picturesque and interesting routes to the interactive map with the ability to upload them in readable formats for navigators.

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The main idea was to create a global route catalog, from local riders. Nobody knows the most interesting paths, better than people living in these places. Thus, traveling around the world, you can easily choose the most interesting routes along your path and read stories about them from other motorcyclists.

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The upcoming events of various types displayed on the map will allow you to find a company on trips or join existing motorcycle events.

In a new place for yourself, you may not know anyone, but with the RoadHunters service, this will cease to be a problem. You will always find a number of people passionate about the same passion for motorcycles.

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A little about the technical part:


666granikHe works as a developer at Mail.ru, for him, besides the interest in creating a service as a product, the desire to do this on modern technologies and expand his knowledge was also important.

Briefly on the stack:

  • Google Cloud Platform for hosting virtuala, data and CI + Docker
  • Mongo Atlas DB as a service
  • Nginx as a frontend server
  • Isomorphic web application with NodeJS / React / Mobx / TypeScript
  • API Application on NodeJS / Express / TypeScript
  • Github private for storing source code
  • Zepplin for working with layouts from the designer

The choice fell in the direction of NodeJS, because I wanted to get acquainted with this technology more deeply, React as a UI library is one of the most common solutions in the industry, TypeScript to add “reliability” to the code, paradoxically, but even as part of a startup development, where speed is more important than reliability , TS did not slow us down.

We had almost no knowledge of the database, but I wanted to try to work with some modern NoSQL solution, the choice was between PostgreSQL and MongoDB, we chose Mongu because it had a convenient client for NodeJS and a free Mongo Atlas cloud solution for starters , by the way, a funny situation came out with him.

We began to lack a free solution for traffic, and even the cheapest tariff plan without restriction is too expensive for us. Traffic is very important to us because in the application the main essence is routes, and these are essentially very long two-dimensional arrays.

As a result, it was decided to roll back to the free option - “a kind of sandbox” and abandon the cloud solution, for the sake of a less reliable and convenient, but more budgetary solution.

And then the guys from the Mongo Atlas team wrote to us in order to find out for what reason we refused their service. We outlined the current situation: that we are a small start-up and we still do not have money to pay for their solution. The answer was unusual - they took us to a project to support startups and allowed us to use their Mongo Atlas service absolutely free for a period of about 99 years.

They are not the only ones who supported our project. Github made private accounts free for teams of less than 3 people somewhere in mid-2019. Saving $ 7 per month - a trifle, but nice.

We also filled out an application for Google’s startup support program. After several stories and completed forms, Google gave us a promo code for a rather big deposit to use their services. Thanks to this, we were able to configure the full CI / CD cycle using Google Cloud Build and the Google Compute Engine, store our Docker Image in their repositories for free, monitor the load on our service, and so on. We were thrilled.

Yes, you may have noticed that we repeated the words of Google and Mongo many times in the previous paragraphs, this is our another naive way of saying to them: “Thank you!”.

If you need deep diving in the technical part, write in the comments - we will publish an article on the topic you are interested in.

Final word


Who can benefit from our service? By creating RoadHunters, we wanted to enable the motorcycle community to become more centralized:
  • Create a global catalog of routes around the world.
  • Connect travelers from all over the world.
  • Quickly and conveniently organize joint trips.
  • Let the freshman or beginner find friends and company for travel.
  • Experienced riders find new routes for themselves.

Thank you for the attention!

I understand that the sphere is narrow and not many will come, but I will be glad if you take a couple of minutes of your time and go to the site, poke it and possibly give some kind of feedback.
Thanks again.

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