Miki Lombardi

Covid-19 - A crowdsourced map for checking supermarket wait times worldwide

See how a simple Python and Redis app, built on a Raspberry Pi, scaled to serve millions of users during a global crisis for just $25 a month.

Covid-19 - A crowdsourced map for checking supermarket wait times worldwide
#1about 4 minutes

Addressing long supermarket queues during the COVID-19 lockdown

The global lockdown in 2020 created long, unsafe lines at essential stores, sparking the need for a solution to manage wait times.

#2about 5 minutes

Building a crowdsourced map to track wait times

The project's core idea was to use a map interface and user-submitted data to provide real-time estimates of wait times at local stores.

#3about 2 minutes

Prototyping the application on a Raspberry Pi

The initial version of the application was built with Python and Flask and hosted on a Raspberry Pi 3B for local testing among friends.

#4about 10 minutes

Migrating from local hosting to a cloud architecture

To handle viral traffic growth, the architecture was moved from a single Raspberry Pi to multiple VPS instances on OVH and Digital Ocean.

#5about 4 minutes

Leveraging Redis for geospatial data management

Redis and its geospatial index commands were critical for efficiently storing, querying, and managing location points and distances on the map.

#6about 5 minutes

Analyzing the project's minimal operational costs

The entire project was run on a very low budget, costing only about $25 per month for cloud services to support millions of user sessions.

#7about 3 minutes

Reflecting on the project's impact and open source

The open-source project successfully served over a million users and highlighted the power of community collaboration in solving real-world problems.

#8about 1 minute

Q&A: Tracking map usage against pandemic spread

User traffic on the map showed a strong correlation with the geographical spread of the pandemic, starting in Italy and moving to the Americas.

#9about 9 minutes

Q&A: Technical lessons and potential future applications

The project could be improved with better code optimization instead of relying heavily on caching, and its technology could be adapted for other use cases like conferences.

Related jobs
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Machine Learning Engineer

Picnic Technologies B.V.

Picnic Technologies B.V.
Amsterdam, Netherlands

Intermediate
Senior
Python
Structured Query Language (SQL)
+1

Matching moments

Getting hired by contributing to open source projects
05:32 MIN

Getting hired by contributing to open source projects

Devs vs. Marketers, COBOL and Copilot, Make Live Coding Easy and more - The Best of LIVE 2025 - Part 3

Organizing a developer conference for 15,000 attendees
01:32 MIN

Organizing a developer conference for 15,000 attendees

Cat Herding with Lions and Tigers - Christian Heilmann

Solving date and time issues with the Temporal API
06:47 MIN

Solving date and time issues with the Temporal API

WeAreDevelopers LIVE – You Don’t Need JavaScript, Modern CSS and More

Improving the developer feedback loop with specialized tools
03:16 MIN

Improving the developer feedback loop with specialized tools

Developer Time Is Valuable - Use the Right Tools - Kilian Valkhof

Using AI to overcome challenges in systems programming
02:49 MIN

Using AI to overcome challenges in systems programming

AI in the Open and in Browsers - Tarek Ziadé

The origin story of the Polypane developer browser
05:28 MIN

The origin story of the Polypane developer browser

Developer Time Is Valuable - Use the Right Tools - Kilian Valkhof

Understanding browser APIs that rely on company services
04:30 MIN

Understanding browser APIs that rely on company services

Developer Time Is Valuable - Use the Right Tools - Kilian Valkhof

Malware campaigns, cloud latency, and government IT theft
01:06 MIN

Malware campaigns, cloud latency, and government IT theft

Fake or News: Self-Driving Cars on Subscription, Crypto Attacks Rising and Working While You Sleep - Théodore Lefèvre

Featured Partners

Related Videos

See all videos
Single Server, Global Reach: Running a Worldwide Marketplace on Bare Metal in a Cloud-Dominated World50:06

Single Server, Global Reach: Running a Worldwide Marketplace on Bare Metal in a Cloud-Dominated World

Jens Happe

40 Minutes to Build a Serverless COVID-19 REST and GraphQL APIs47:16

40 Minutes to Build a Serverless COVID-19 REST and GraphQL APIs

Maxime Beugnet

Scaling: from 0 to 20 million users28:12

Scaling: from 0 to 20 million users

Josip Stuhli

Hate organising your photos? Try it with 5 Terabytes30:25

Hate organising your photos? Try it with 5 Terabytes

Arto Liukkonen

WeAreDevelopers LIVE - Vector Similarity Search Patterns for Efficiency and more1:05:44

WeAreDevelopers LIVE - Vector Similarity Search Patterns for Efficiency and more

Chris Heilmann, Daniel Cranney, Raphael De Lio & Developer Advocate at Redis

100 million days in Vienna: A story of APIs & AI in tourism.43:11

100 million days in Vienna: A story of APIs & AI in tourism.

Thomas Reiter

Web development: where are we, and where are we going?32:56

Web development: where are we, and where are we going?

Laurie Voss

Creating a routing app with Google Maps API from scratch55:39

Creating a routing app with Google Maps API from scratch

Germán Álvarez

Related Articles

View all articles
A
Apify
What Developers Are Building to Win $1 Million with Apify
Apify started as a web scraping product, but quickly evolved into a full-blown platform and marketplace for developers to write code, and monetise it by creating Actors, tools that simplify the scraping process for others. Running until the end of J...
What Developers Are Building to Win $1 Million with Apify

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.