OFFLFIRSOCH 2024 - Flights

In response to Solerpunk's 2024 OFFLine-FIRst SOftware CHallenge, I wrote a command line script for looking up flight 'information' offline.

Solderpunk post on OFFLFIRSOCH

My submission on github

As with all things Solderpunk related, I loved the general concept behind this and was eager to participate. A few things stopped me from engaging with it fully, however:

1. I went on holiday for a around 10 days in March

2. I struggled to make the chosen language (clojure via babashka) fully 'portable' in the way outlined by Solderpunk

3. Calculating flight times accurately is very difficult in a small-scale application like this!

In relation to point 2, I am still learning clojure/babashka, so I could not find a way to properly 'package' the script and sqlite database into something more portable. I might come back to that some day. To just run it in an expirimental sense, you will have to clone the repo, install babashka (with one line), and it should work from within the directory at least.

In relation to point 3, unfortunately the lack of robustness around the calculation of flight times makes this more of a 'proof of concept' than an application that could be actually used in daily life. Not that a fully robust cli tool for looking up the length of flights would be super usable in any case!

I enjoyed the challenge and it got me thinking about other, more useful applications that could be made 'offline'.

Gemlog