Show HN: NextJS + Node.js library for location tracking of business assets | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: NextJS + Node.js library for location tracking of business assets

github.com

33 pointskdeorah19 comments

Interesting from a tech perspective, but I would change "business assets" in the title with "employees" or "workforce".

This is tracking people and their actions, not tracking "stuff".

Does Uber track the ride or the driver? App users are carrying out work and the business wants to track work. Asset track and telematics are product categories used in the industry where work is on the move. This app belongs in the same bucket.

Their own blog post says "workforce" instead of "business assets". http://hypertrack.com/blog/2019/09/09/open-sourcing-placelin...

I thougt it sounded very professional since tracking employees could be illegal while assets are fair game.

good point, the workforce seems to be the main use case. especially, because it provides an expense report feature

How does this compare to the technology typically used by public transportation companies so we can find out if our bus is late? Cheaper to implement? Easier to implement? Different features?

We built this app to dogfood our location tracking platform. Places visited, commutes taken, walks to lunches, drives to meetings … really the timeline of movement from place to place. In the end, we had built a number of useful backend libraries in NodeJS and frontend libraries in NextJS. Sharing that out to re-use and re-purpose.

The README alone is excellent, well done

came across this neat repo: https://github.com/matiassingers/awesome-readme. Great set of READMEs worth looking at when writing your own

This is a great example of how one can layer an application on top of HyperTrack location event streaming platform to do display useful data. Once you have integrated the mobile SDK and started generating location events, you can start creating applications just like this one to provide richer experiences.

do you provide any other opensource apps?

Yes look us up here: https://github.com/hypertrack

Cool project. How would I use another map layer (don't have a google maps api key)? And why did you deploy to Heroku and not to AWS/GCP/Azure?

Yes you could use MapTiler or Mapbox or a React component for any other map. Google is most popular and therefore added to sample.

Heroku is the easiest to get up and running with. PaaS over raw store/compute when you are getting started.

Have you seen businesses, that want to track assets, move to smartphone based tracking instead of traditional GPS tracking? Any pros and cons?

Smartphone is where the work app sits. Making the app location aware serves a diff need than vehicle connected telematics. The worlds converge a bit but tandem is more the norm than replacement.

Interesting! Why would you use localtunnel as opposed to ngrok ?

there seem to be quite a few available. I also like telebit. btw, saw a comparison the other day: https://www.chenhuijing.com/blog/tunnelling-services-for-exp...

good question, main goal was to get the project up and running quickly. guess for the frontend there's less need for it. the backend project uses localtunnel to consume webhooks while testing locally. ngrok looks great!

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