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 wa

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.