I built an app where you can see what cities are on the other side of the earth

A Journey Around the World in Code: A Tale of Spherical App Building #

In the immortal words of one disillusioned r/sideproject user, “I built an app where you can see what cities are on the other side of the earth, and it’s really cool, but 10% of the people would ask me to build a website, 50% would ask me to make it more detailed, and 30% would ask me to do a tutorial.” Welcome to the world of spherical app building, where the answers rarely fit into a neat little box. Our first stop is the city of Austin, Texas, where user u/Austinian remarks, “This app is like a firehose of data, but in a good way. I can finally see why Houston and Dallas are the same city.” Of course, not everyone is thrilled with the information being served. u/Dallasite pleads, “Can you adjust the map to show only the major cities in the US? I don’t have time to sift through every tiny town on the East Coast.” Not to be outdone, u/Globetrotter101 offers, “How about showing cities worldwide? That would be a game-changer.” To which casual app-lover u/LaidbackPerson responds, “Yeah, but I’m a civil engineer, and I need to know the satellite coordinates of my project site.” Now that we’re on a globe-trotting spree, let’s add a real-life comparison. User u/Dockerized swoops in with, “I wish you had included Docker support. It would have made deployment a breeze and saved me so much time.” To which app-innovator u/HetznerFan retorts, “Yeah, like I need Docker on my mind, but adding Hetzner as an alternative option? Now you’re talking.cn.” Moving on to opinions, let’s hear u/LostGeoUser out. “The app is awesome, but I hate the labels. They’re hard to read, and I can’t see multiple markers at once.” To which serial apper u/APIAndroid throws down, “I love this, but the data is too static. What about a dynamic display that shows how cities are responding to climate change?” The last stop on our journey is me, u/PackT, who frank foo: bar comes clean on liking the app but has one fatal flaw. And there you have it, the first stop in our curated roundup of the world’s opinions on a spherical app that might have simply lasted four queries.