Movable Type Projects

Track.Trail

Track.Trail provide event tracking services for foot and cycle races, Duke of Edinburgh events, and similar. They provide trackers for events, displaying the tracker locations on a map.

However, prior to my involvement, the web page refreshes were made every three minutes, which provided a poor user experience, and also created load spikes on the web server which was holding back expansion opportunities. Their offshore developers were struggling to represent tracker locations in real time, and after initially offering guidance to the developers, I was eventually engaged to redevelop the site.

I created a system which could respond in real time to reports received from the tracker devices:

a regular web server presents a web page showing a map covering the extent of the event and the location of all participants, and also a leaderboard showing arrival times at checkpoints passed, and ETAs at forthcoming checkpoints
a ‘tracker-listener server’ receives TCP messages from tracker devices
when the tracker-listener receives a report, it records the details in the database, and notifies a ‘websocket server’
the websocket server sends WebSocket messages to all connected web browsers, which update the tracker position on the map

Through a rethought architecture, and the use of Node.js, the capacity of the site increased by 10-fold, if not 100-fold, enabling business expansion opportunities.

We continue to work as an effective team, jointly finding improvements to the website user experience (UX), not least through canvassing feedback from users.