Direct Flights

Big day! pushed the website on Product Hunt and in my social profiles.

Freaked out a bit when the website went down 😱 apparently it's called the hug of death!

I wrote a detailed comment on ProductHunt to explain how I approached this project (Why? What? Business model? How it’s made? How you can help…).

Would love to have your feedback and support: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/direct-flights

Also, I'm new on Indie Hacker, I find it great to be accountable especially for solo-makers!

While I'm working on the side on this, I kept pushing code for both the frontend and backend (as they were two separate code bases).

I was sending out the website to test out among friends and family, stumbled upon many blockers on deploying the workers to pul the data (as there is +32M flights to pull from an unpredictable API).

https://direct-flights.com/

Before starting any line of code, I create a mockup on Sketch of the rendering to be able to assess the technical implementation of the project (data to pull/aggregate, visualization style on both desktop and mobile).

I goat motivation one evening to start working on the visualization and a 3D globe that would draw flight routes.

I entertain a list of project idea or problem I stumbled upon, and the idea of visualizing flight routes was coming up often especially when I go to the last page of the airline magazine and see the airline's destinations! 🤓

After searching for flight data sources, I found that kiwi is providing an API to query flights. It was the spark that made me want to pursue this idea. I was amazed after searching for a name to find that "direct-flights.com" was available! 🤩

Since I was a kid, I have always been fascinated by the flight display screens at the airport wondering where I can fly direct if I had an open ticket 🙃

The motivation to build this project came while traveling and working remotely in Asia. I was hopping from a country to the other based on the cheapest flight and most direct option. I couldn't find a good visualization with the schedule about the city where I was based. Also, I realized that most airport websites don't provide such information – while SkyScanner/Kayak/Google-Flights didn't have a weekly overview of flights with a focus on direct flights.

I wrote down that idea on my notes and let it infuses 🧪