3 ms·

Haha the pokemonGo Api! I was in the final stages of a bootcamp right when Pokemon Go came out, and a bunch of us were desperately trying to put ourselves on th

Haha the pokemonGo Api! I was in the final stages of a bootcamp right when Pokemon Go came out, and a bunch of us were desperately trying to put ourselves on the map by doing something lit with Pokemon Go. We discovered that the spawns were cycled hourly, so if we could gather enough data we could quite accurately map out every pokemon in the city. Then we came up against not knowing anything about parsing the data we were just yanking back from requests to the API... I think some point in the authentication phase? So we saw that python library, saw that they had solved the problem, but it was using something we had absolutely no idea how to transcribe to Node, and this is like, a bunch of 3 month old freshfaced Javascript devs. Figuring out Python was kinda out of the question (better to focus on pitching ourselves as hardcore Node/Javascript devs in the upcoming job search). And then, like, three days after we started the journey, someone had not only beat us to the punch, they had done so at a professional level. I don't remember which site it was, but not only did it work perfectly, it didn't require the "crowd sourced" solution to mapping out pokemon that we were counting on. The developer/s had somehow figured out how to just yank all pokemon locations. And on top of that the app was functional, gorgeous, even had its own URL (we were still in the "all our apps are laughinggiraffe.herokuapp.com domains" phase). All in all, great experience. A nice fresh slap in the face to how much work we had ahead of us, and good fun had anyway.

hamandcheese 6y ago
There were a lot of devs working on that at the time, don’t feel bad.
tornupinside 6y ago
Stories like this is why I love the HN community
enjoiful 6y ago
There were amazing city maps for active pokemon spawns. It would show all currently spawned pokemon, as well as how much longer they would be there for. It was fun to see what is around you at any given point, but only marginally useful without notifications. I noticed that one of the more popular SF pokmeon go mapping websites was using a simple REST API. You gave it a coordinate, and it would spit out locations for all pokemon within a mile radius or so. I created a background python task on my computer that would hit this API every 2 minutes with my apartment's location, plus like a mile range around it. If it found any rare pokemon (Gyrados, Dragonite, etc.) the python program sent a message to a specific slack channel that I set up. It was an easy way for me to get push notifications on my phone when something spawned around me. From there, I would high tail it on my bike and catch the pokemon. I still have this Pokemon channel at my work Slack instance haha. It was amazing. My pokedex filled up so quick. This approach only worked for about 3 weeks until Niantic majorly cracked down on their API, which rendered all the API scrappers obsolete. But that period was by far the most fun I had with Pokemon GO. I whipped that program up in like 3 hours on a Saturday and it was the only time in my life where I've felt like a l33t hacker, even though I was doing some very basic REST API operations. The actually impressive thing was the mapping website that was scrapping the actual Niantic API.
delusional 6y ago
I had a friend that ran some of that software. The trick was to just make a bunch of accounts and just fake them walking all across the map to gather the locations. Basically crowd sourcing it, but with fake people. The number of fake accounts was a function of how large of an area you wanted to cover and how often you wanted it to update.
- alexeldeib 6y ago
  I remember some really good public sites, but the quality cycled up and down and the Pokemon devs fought back a bit. I used some tool that basically was what OP described, but let me easily self-host a server. At the time I think there was some hack where the server component could fake location, so you'd just send it off to walk a geofenced area and could browse on mobile remotely while playing the game. Ran it off my laptop, then a DO droplet. Good times.
pokemapper 6y ago
I got another fun story from the other side. I worked at one of the few small companies that provided free Openstreetmap-powered basemaps at the time: you could just grab our map tile URL, plug it into Leaflet or any other mapping lib, and get a instant basemap with OSM data, provided you gave credit to us and under some not really restrictive ToS. In fact you probably used us at the time. The technology behind those tiles wasn't really sophisticated back then -- a few oversized and replicated PostgreSQL servers with PostGIS and the OSM data loaded and synchronized frequently with a few materialized views on top, and a bunch of servers painting tiles with Mapnik using them as a source (there are a few options that started to prove to be more efficient at the time, but that's what we decided to go on then for other reasons), with a few layers of caching on the front. Tile rendering times for cache misses weren't really good depending on the complexity of the requested tile, given most stuff wasn't prerendered, but once things got cached and since most popular maps were localized to specific regions that got quickly cached, this worked pretty well after the first visitor had came. But then... Pokemon Go and your bazillion maps came with the worst scale test for our design you could ever think of: a volume of tile requests a few levels of magnitude higher than usual, of locations from the half of the world playing Pokemon Go back then, zooming to _their streets_ (which were randomly distributed all over the world and therefore most probably uncached at that zoom level) to try and find their closest Charmanders. Needless to say, those were some few nice days of firefighting and playing whack-a-mole replicating databases, adjusting caches, banning requests from the worst offenders and, at some of the worst points, everything that included the word "poke" on their domain.
- odensc 6y ago
  Mapzen? :)
varenc 6y ago
Was the site you remember instapokego.com per chance? :-) It's down now but here's the archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20170308154111/www.instapokego.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170308154111/www.instapokego.c...

hamandcheese 6y ago

There were a lot of devs working on that at the time, don’t feel bad.

tornupinside 6y ago

Stories like this is why I love the HN community

enjoiful 6y ago

There were amazing city maps for active pokemon spawns. It would show all currently spawned pokemon, as well as how much longer they would be there for. It was fun to see what is around you at any given point, but only marginally useful without notifications. I noticed that one of the more popular SF pokmeon go mapping websites was using a simple REST API. You gave it a coordinate, and it would spit out locations for all pokemon within a mile radius or so. I created a background python task on my computer that would hit this API every 2 minutes with my apartment's location, plus like a mile range around it. If it found any rare pokemon (Gyrados, Dragonite, etc.) the python program sent a message to a specific slack channel that I set up. It was an easy way for me to get push notifications on my phone when something spawned around me. From there, I would high tail it on my bike and catch the pokemon. I still have this Pokemon channel at my work Slack instance haha. It was amazing. My pokedex filled up so quick. This approach only worked for about 3 weeks until Niantic majorly cracked down on their API, which rendered all the API scrappers obsolete. But that period was by far the most fun I had with Pokemon GO. I whipped that program up in like 3 hours on a Saturday and it was the only time in my life where I've felt like a l33t hacker, even though I was doing some very basic REST API operations. The actually impressive thing was the mapping website that was scrapping the actual Niantic API.

delusional 6y ago

I had a friend that ran some of that software. The trick was to just make a bunch of accounts and just fake them walking all across the map to gather the locations. Basically crowd sourcing it, but with fake people. The number of fake accounts was a function of how large of an area you wanted to cover and how often you wanted it to update.

alexeldeib 6y ago
I remember some really good public sites, but the quality cycled up and down and the Pokemon devs fought back a bit. I used some tool that basically was what OP described, but let me easily self-host a server. At the time I think there was some hack where the server component could fake location, so you'd just send it off to walk a geofenced area and could browse on mobile remotely while playing the game. Ran it off my laptop, then a DO droplet. Good times.

pokemapper 6y ago

I got another fun story from the other side. I worked at one of the few small companies that provided free Openstreetmap-powered basemaps at the time: you could just grab our map tile URL, plug it into Leaflet or any other mapping lib, and get a instant basemap with OSM data, provided you gave credit to us and under some not really restrictive ToS. In fact you probably used us at the time. The technology behind those tiles wasn't really sophisticated back then -- a few oversized and replicated PostgreSQL servers with PostGIS and the OSM data loaded and synchronized frequently with a few materialized views on top, and a bunch of servers painting tiles with Mapnik using them as a source (there are a few options that started to prove to be more efficient at the time, but that's what we decided to go on then for other reasons), with a few layers of caching on the front. Tile rendering times for cache misses weren't really good depending on the complexity of the requested tile, given most stuff wasn't prerendered, but once things got cached and since most popular maps were localized to specific regions that got quickly cached, this worked pretty well after the first visitor had came. But then... Pokemon Go and your bazillion maps came with the worst scale test for our design you could ever think of: a volume of tile requests a few levels of magnitude higher than usual, of locations from the half of the world playing Pokemon Go back then, zooming to _their streets_ (which were randomly distributed all over the world and therefore most probably uncached at that zoom level) to try and find their closest Charmanders. Needless to say, those were some few nice days of firefighting and playing whack-a-mole replicating databases, adjusting caches, banning requests from the worst offenders and, at some of the worst points, everything that included the word "poke" on their domain.

odensc 6y ago
Mapzen? :)

varenc 6y ago

Was the site you remember instapokego.com per chance? :-) It's down now but here's the archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20170308154111/www.instapokego.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170308154111/www.instapokego.c...