My hometown is a touristic island on the seaside near to the beach. There is only one bridge that connects it to the mainland, and it means that traffic is a nightmare during summer, with frequent and annoying jams.

Jam hours depend on a lot of circumstances (weekday, traffic flow dynamics, weather, etc) and they seem to be nearly unpredictable. Well, I felt that I had to do something about it. I wanted to know at least how much traffic there is now, if is increasing or not, and its typical variation within the day.

It was definitely a topic for a small passion project during work vacation, so I’ve built a small mobile app in Flask to help drivers understand whether or not put themselves on the road. I called it RomeaJam:

This little project led me to learn some cool Python stuff:

• ORMs: SQLAlchemy was a revelation - I always desired an abstraction level that could handle classes without writing raw SQL!

• Flask packages: Flask is growing very fast, and there is an ecosystem of packages for doing literally everything (scheduling jobs, manage SQLAlchemy, tracking app usage on the server side without cookies, etc)

• Deploy Flask to production: I used apache2 with a python virtualenv, and I learned that it can be quite an hassle. I definitely have to try to dokerize it.

I’m also excited because in the next year I will have enough data for time series analysis and short term traffic predictions!

GitHub repository for this project

UPDATE (2016-11-05): The months passed and my MySQL database is still increasing (2M rows!). I learned that an index rebuild with mysqlcheck -Aa -uroot -p can speed up querying time, but still the webapp became very slow (expecially on query with joins). During the winter it’s not used, but in the next summer I will have to move old data to a different database, leaving only the last month available for the webapp.