Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve written a post and this one would qualify as shameless promotion, but I’m going to do it anyway. Â A couple weeks ago, my teammates and I got into a quick discussion during our weekly team meeting about a particular meatball food truck here in Chicago. Â Fast forward a couple days later and another co-worker, upon hearing that we were intrigued about food trucks, emails a few of us to see if we had heard/tried another truck. Â For some reason, a new idea popped into my head: food truck aggregator. Â Upon some initial investigation to see if one already existed, I found there were some decent ones for L.A., D.C. and NYC Â but none really for Chicago. Â I mean, there were a couple sites and mobile apps but I felt they were lacking. Â Either they were only following a few trucks or I felt the presentation could be better or we thought there were features that were missing.
While everyone else sitting around us thought we were probably just joking, we actually started on the idea that night. Â I began building the site piece by piece using various APIs, most of them, I had never used before. Â I have to admit, I became slightly obsessed trying to figure out how to get this to work. Â It’s actually quite refreshing to have a project that has peaked my interest so much in a long time. Â After searching for the perfect domain that was actually available, I settled on using foodtruckcorner.com and launched it 3 weeks later.
Granted, it’s not quite the finished version yet but the basic functionality is there – you can see multiple truck locations all on one page. Â Most of the features I’m looking to incorporate involve some type of filtering – whether it’s for particular type of truck, trucks that are available for a particular time span or trucks located within a radius of a specific location that the user searches on. Â I am also constantly tweaking my mapping ability.
So yeah, check it out if you live in the Chicagoland area. Â I’m hoping once I get everything set that I can expand to other cities.
