From a personal need to an application
Here is the story of the bagfinder.cc application that I developed in the past few weeks.
As often happens, it all started with a personal need: I was looking for a new bag to travel with, and my main requirement was the ability to carry it on board as cabin luggage for future air travel.
I then realized four things:
- There is no website or application that allows you to know the cabin baggage restrictions for major airlines.
- On the websites of bag and luggage manufacturers, there is sometimes a mention stating that “the bag is compatible with most airlines,” but this is by no means a guarantee.
- Tedious work is required to search for the allowed dimensions on airline websites.
- There are some websites that display cabin baggage sizes, but the user experience is consistently terrible because you have to manually search for the information.
I repeated the process for 2 or 3 bags, and then I quickly stopped looking for a bag to focus on developing an application.
The application is extremely simple. The user enters the dimensions of their bag or luggage, and the application automatically displays a list of compatible airlines.
Simple, basic, effective.
The dimensions of bags and luggage are available on the majority of e-commerce websites, so it is very easy to find this information.
Currently, here are the available features:
- Compatibility search by bag dimensions.
- List of airlines, with each one providing details of their cabin baggage policy, as well as a suggestion of compatible bags.
On the tech side,
We have an unpretentious, ultra-basic application.
I developed my application using NodeJS. There is currently no front-end framework, but I will work on it.
For the database, I opted for an SQLite database loaded from a Google Sheets document. This greatly simplifies data management.
GitHub is used as the repository, and I use GitHub Actions for CI/CD. Everything is automatically deployed on Azure.
Finally, I use scraping techniques to manage the data and OpenAI for translations (English, French, Spanish).
What’s next?
There are no specific plans at the moment, just ideas but no pressure. This web app is more of a playground and testing ground.
Visit https://bagfinder.cc/
If you are interested in this project, you can join the backstage.
