I wanted a faster, easier mapping app to plan motorcycle rides for myself and with groups, so I finally bit the bullet and started building my own at the beginning of this year.

I got to the MVP state which was useful for my personal use case in about a month. I took it further than that as a learning exercise and as a means to share it with others. Some features that came later are live cursors (like Figma), elevation chart and grade overlay, and QR-code enabled collaboration links to make in-person sharing simple.

Check it out! https://plotalong.app

Figuring out the exact UI/UX I wanted was the hardest part. I did the branding myself, handdrawn on paper, traced in Procreate, and vectored in Sketch. Fast iterations and a good test suite made it possible to try lots of different approaches and refine the one I liked the most. There are roughly 4000 unit tests and over 300 e2e tests that run on multiple environments with fully automated CI/CD.

I’m using Mapbox for the frontend and the whole app is basically just a monolithic Cloudflare Worker. Claude pretty much implemented the entire thing. I got a lot of mileage out of self hosting a Gitea project and recording all my planning sessions as Milestones and Issues. Claude has his own account without admin privileges. The process of managing a team of agents to build this practically autonomously was a bit jaw dropping and eye opening to be honest.

I would love to hear from other pleasure & sport drivers about the features they use or want the most in a routing app. I have an Android app in Play Store review, if you’d like to be an early access tester shoot me an email at my handle @plotalong.app