A crowdsourced map for checking supermarket wait times worldwide

A 2020 project to help people during the covid19 lockdown to stay as little as possible in line

Miki Lombardi

Analytics Case Study Data Development HTTP

See in schedule: Fri, Jul 30, 13:45-14:15 CEST (30 min) Download/View Slides

In March 2020 the world is completely blocked and people are lining up to shop or to the pharmacy or to buy basic necessities.

There have been many initiatives and among these I have created a worldwide map that allows anyone to check the estimated waiting times of supermarkets, pharmacies and places of interest.

In addition to this, I gave people the opportunity to check waiting times and correct them through a crowdsourcing mechanism.

All this, to be fast in development and in responding to requests, has exploited Redis with its geospatial indexes.

The opensource project has obtained more than 2Mln visits in about 3 months of life, until June 2020 when the pandemic slowed down.

In this talk we will see the architecture and the problems I encountered and solved with Redis, uWSGI, Flask and how I scaled up the project from a Raspberry to 4 VPS dislocated in Europe and America region.

The main objective of this talk is to introduce problem solving through the various technologies of Python and other tools (such as Redis) and the logical / creative process that I had to go through.

Other objectives are to encourage collaboration and the sharing of ideas or open source projects to allow you to collaborate between different communities and people without fear of making mistakes or showing your code. It is thanks to the open source community that this project has been possible.

Type: Talk (30 mins); Python level: Beginner; Domain level: Beginner


Miki Lombardi

Growens s.p.a

I helped Aperion and Plansoft to delivery high quality products, software and services to their customers. Now my focus is to do the same in Growens. My core knowledge has been instrumental in resolving complex architectural and software development challenges.

Working within the scopes of a lot of technical roles such as software engineer, course trainer, tech lead, solutions architect and head of R&D, I have developed a precise understanding of various technicalities which has helped me in maximizing value of my company and products in my current leadership roles.

My colleagues know me as an excellent communicator. I like to use an interactive approach for understanding and solving problems of varied scopes.
I’m also enjoying sharing the knowledge with the community by writing articles and build / contribute to open source project.
Always striving to improve, I love learning new things and face challenging problems. I love to follow a mentor and I like to be mentor for others too.

In my experience I have always found a friendly and homely environment, even in large companies. I like to always give a touch of style to work, especially with the people who are part of it.

I'm always looking for the next challenge and I would like to be part of the solution process.