Recreationally overengineering my location history

Summary

2025-08-19 overengineering, software It’s been a while since I published my last #overengineering blog post. That’s not because I didn’t overengineer things, I was busier starting projects as opposed to finishing projects. Today, we shall fix this lack of content. I like data. That’s about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning. A big part of that is visualizing various aspects of my life. I consider myself lucky enough to be able to travel quite a bit, so I always liked having a visual history of all the places I’ve been - and I’m sure lots of people can relate to that. I used to be quite happy with the Google Maps Location Timeline, but I stopped that a while ago for obvious privacy reasons. So I decided to build my own, and that’s what I’ll be talking about here. Okay, let’s go1. The project The main thing I wanted out of this is a map that’s showing places I have been in some visually pleasing way. This is what I ended up with: In addition to that, I have a way to share my live location. I don’t use this very often, but occasionally I need to share my real-time location with people, for example when I’m on my way to pick someone up. The live location sharing works with only a link, so I can just drop that into a chat and make it easy to access. To bootstrap the data, I imported my previous data from Google Maps. I have some significant gaps in there for unknown reasons, but it’s still a lot of travel history. I don’t need an exact account of where I’ve been every second, I just want to have markers whenever I’m in a new part of the world, so the location updates can be quite infrequent. Since I’m an iOS user, I created a small application that sends “significant location” updates, which allows me to collect location data with virtually no impact on battery life, but I’ll talk more about that later. The backend For quite some time now, I’ve been developing web projects that need backend logic in Rust. I’m not saying that you should do it, but I’m mainly n...