Origin Story
Lookup Fatigue
In the summer of 2025, we adopted our first puppy. We named him Huey Louie after the band Huey Lews and the News. It wasn't for being a super fan of the group, more so that it was a funny name. I found myself having to work from home a lot more often to make sure he didn't burn the house down as well. It was during this period that the perfect storm was brewing to create the conditions for Rutaroo.
You see, since I worked frome home, I had a lot of flexibility to choose when to go to get random chores and tasks done. I made trips to the grocery store, walmart and of course, the dog park. The traffic like any city was very unpredictable and I would often get caught up in surprise traffic even when I left at what should have been a lull. It was made even worse due to constant construction in preparation for the World Cup. So I started checking multiple times a day to keep an eye on things. Halfway torn between not wanting to pull myself out of a particular flow state while anxiuosly trying to get ahead of losing tons of time stuck in the rising tide of traffic. I found myself typing out "drive to metrocan dog park" and clicking and loading up maps what felt like every hour, each time feeling more fatigued doing the same thing over and over.
It started to get really annoying and I was resolved to find a nice clean alternative. Surely someone has already done this and made a nice neat little widget out of it. How hard can it be? As a programmer I already knew that there must've been tons of providers of traffic data so there shouldn't be a problem. It would be trivial pull that data down and slap a pretty layer of paint on it and call it a day. Right?
The search
Wrong. As I searched I started to realize that no, this simple widget just DID NOT exist. I asked GPT to dig deeper and literally every single suggestion it gave was either defunct or didn't do what I acutally wanted. The suggested alternatives fell into 2 broad categories:
1 Inadequate
There were a few suggestions like Google maps widgets. Unfortunately they didn't show commute times. It just showed traffic in a little map around your current position
There are also some public transport specific apps, but they were often times just for specific cities but more importantly, didn't really tell you the total length of time of travel to multiple destinations.
I found out that some people were doing something similar in home assitant, a smart home automation platform (which coincidentally I actually used). But I found out that a lot of them were relying on sketchy, unpublished access to platforms like waze and were likely breaking some form of terms. Or they were relying on free google maps api access to do simpler automations. Again, not showing multiple routes that I could read.
2 Commercial offerings
There were a lot of "solutions" that was meant for city traffic management whos price was "call us" AKA not in your budget.
Quick app, in and out
But it didn't make sense. Surely I'm not that weird? I coulnd't be the only one who would want something like this. Increduility changed to excitement however because this was something I knew I could easily make.
The app would:
- Allow me to add common routes that I would take frequently
- Let me pick between driving and public transport since thoes are the ones that tend to vary the most
- Show me in a clear, clean way the time each route was taking, live, in that moment
- Put something in the tray so that I could glance at it easily
But it still was a bit unnerving why this thing didn't exist. Usually low hanging fruit ideas like this are all picked off by throngs of developers way faster and smarter than me. It wasn't until I dug deep that I unconvered the real reason why it didn't exist.