cta-trains

A small train tracker app with simple functionality for:

• Viewing estimated arrival times at a station
• Searching for stations

Some design and implementation notes:

• The front end is organized into a directory structure of pages, which have layouts, which have components
• Rebass was used to mock the UI up quickly. I've been curious about it for a while, but this is this the first time actually trying it, and it feels nice.
• There's a small slice of Redux managing state info for the query (since, e.g., the search
  bar updates it, and the search view consumes it). The hooks syntax was used.
• The app ingests the TrainTracker API for arrival times as well as a JSON object of the L stops in order to list and search over stations. mapid is used as a common key between API and dataset.

In terms of future possibilities:

• It would be interesting to do more aggregation on the stations (across platforms) so the search only goes by stations.
• With the above, knowing the lines and the stations along them would allow for a small visual "map" to be displayed with the station.
• It would be cool to have the cards be clickable and explore trains in addition to stations. Using more API (perhaps the follow this train API, or using prior knowledge about the lines as above) to display not just the end destination, but the destination one stop and two stops down would be nice.
• Offloading and caching more of the on-the-fly calculations to the api.js layer. For example, we do a few transformations in the SearchView that don't need to be done on every update.

This project was bootstrapped with Create React App. To run, cd to the project directory, then run:

npm start

Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.