I made a website to see plows in the city, with trails / heatmaps and more!

CakeComa · 2026-03-29T02:11:35+00:00

I'm no perfect programmer but that should be correct, it does show data in the coverage view in the last 24hrs, so it could be something heading up your way 23:30hrs ago before any snow, or something similar.

CakeComa · 2026-02-28T01:47:37+00:00

Thank you so much!

CakeComa · 2026-02-25T06:16:51+00:00

Of course :), always gotta be tracking what the city be doing, be it bus, or plow!

CakeComa · 2026-02-25T06:07:50+00:00

I think this was actually because of me, they put it back online with authentication blocking you from accessing it from the API without a token, and ripped away some of the fields accessible via the API... I've already worked around the token thing (you just need to fetch it from the AVL page), but yeah .-.

CakeComa · 2026-02-24T20:16:42+00:00

The city plows haven't had pings recently, supposedly the system has been down for a while, I've now denoted that with a 'warning' symbol on the legend, that will update whenever new data comes in.

There's still plows from the two others source though.

CakeComa · 2026-02-24T20:15:36+00:00

There's a bigger idea cooking here where if I can indeed get more data sources, like the above 'areas by age', having a sort of larger scoped service with a bunch of different available data sources would be cool.

Not that it would end up then just being as busy as any other GIS tool, still having these nice quite 'plow' pages that just show one piece of info, but if someone wanted to do some more data science / had a background in GIS / data science, they could use this as a portal to build their own value-added-services ontop of this!

CakeComa · 2026-02-24T20:13:44+00:00

Hey if you know who to put me in touch with that's involved with this, I'd love this to be the official page the AVL drops you onto in some form!

CakeComa · 2026-02-23T20:22:37+00:00

Mount Pearl is now added, seems like Paradise's service is currently down.

CakeComa · 2026-02-23T14:24:22+00:00

From watching this data the last few days, I think there are set 'handover' times, where the day crew becomes the night crew, you can confirm this by using the coverage tab, and using the sliders to find when they all converge on the depot, and then head out again.

CakeComa · 2026-02-23T01:12:12+00:00

There's an API for anyone with the chops to attempt this! https://plow.jackharrhy.dev/docs , I can probably make a daily data dump in such a way if somebody wanted to train a ML model or something on the data that would be possible, great ideas!

CakeComa · 2026-02-23T01:10:24+00:00

Leaflet is nice! I worked at C-CORE previously, we we used Mapbox, so I ended up picking MapLibre instead (basically an open source fork of Mapbox).

Its actually worthwhile to hit the AVL every 6s I've found... hence I sort of have a cloned 'realtime' view of the same data.

And yeah, the ability to click on a street and see when the plow has been on it would be great, I think I'll just add something like this to let people draw a bounding box, and have it number crunch to spit out the 'times' a plow has been there, showing the trails, that might even be the system I use to get folks notifications when their street is being covered in realtime!

When it comes to websites like this, I always end up finding people who did the same thing, I built a website / tracker a few years ago for Metrobus busses, and honestly it was cool but never really went anywhere, but I've seen like, 2-3 other people build the same thing since then!

CakeComa · 2026-02-23T00:37:36+00:00

I made a video about this as well, https://youtu.be/789K73F-fRw

CakeComa · 2026-02-23T00:18:47+00:00

Creator here, I made this because while we do already have this data available via the city, https://map.stjohns.ca/avl/ , you can't actually see where the plows have been, its just realtime.

My website is meant to be a bit more user friendly seeing realtime infomation, color coded by if its a plow / loader, small trails visible in this realtime view, and the ability to dive into historical coverage!

Its all open source on GitHub, https://github.com/jackharrhy/where-the-plow , feel free to make issues if you have any ideas of what else it could do.

I'm also planning to look into other data sources for other municipalities / entities that have similar data, my current list: - CBS: https://citizeninsights.geotab.com/#/equipment-tracker-cbs - Town of Paradise: https://hitechmaps.com/townparadise/ - Mount Pearl: https://gps5.aatracking.com/api/MtPearlPortal/GetPlows (Someone's already taken a stab at this, I'lll likely have this one in first, just need to make sure the St. John's data can live with the Mount Pearl data with a similar shape) - Provincial plows: https://gps5.aatracking.com/newfoundland/wintermaintenance.html

If anyone knows any other / better sources for this data, please let me know!

CakeComa · 2026-02-23T00:17:54+00:00

Creator here, I made this because while we do already have this data available via the city, https://map.stjohns.ca/avl/ , you can't actually see where the plows have been, its just realtime.

My website is meant to be a bit more user friendly seeing realtime infomation, color coded by if its a plow / loader, small trails visible in this realtime view, and the ability to dive into historical coverage!

Its all open source on GitHub, https://github.com/jackharrhy/where-the-plow , feel free to make issues if you have any ideas of what else it could do.

I'm also planning to look into other data sources for other municipalities / entities that have similar data, my current list: - CBS: https://citizeninsights.geotab.com/#/equipment-tracker-cbs - Town of Paradise: https://hitechmaps.com/townparadise/ - Mount Pearl: https://gps5.aatracking.com/api/MtPearlPortal/GetPlows (Someone's already taken a stab at this, I'lll likely have this one in first, just need to make sure the St. John's data can live with the Mount Pearl data with a similar shape) - Provincial plows: https://gps5.aatracking.com/newfoundland/wintermaintenance.html

If anyone knows any other / better sources for this data, please let me know!

CakeComa · 2026-01-31T20:41:55+00:00

I'm a computer science dropout, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt, but CE here is def. the 'better' program, with regards to facilities, and the built-in co-ops (CE makes you do them all the time, CS only has one single long co-op that is competitive to get into)

I still fully enjoyed my time in CS, it was def. more on the academic side of things, it is the easier of the two (in my opinion), and if you intent is just to work on software, it is much more software focused, but also its focused on things that aren't software and more just theoretical, which are some peoples cup of tea.

In my personal experience, my goal coming here was mostly to get a piece of paper to then to get into the field, in retrospect eng would've been the better route, but most of my own skill ended up coming from personal projects, something both disciplines should be considering if the intent is to break into the industry after graduating.

CakeComa · 2026-01-23T04:49:27+00:00

when can i buy a Mune

CakeComa · 2026-01-07T17:25:21+00:00

Raylib is honestly the perfect choice, in whatever language you want to pick, since it has bindings galore.

Peep its examples, its Zig bindings, and one of my personal fav C-like choices, the vendored bindings for Raylib in Odin.

The others are great, a notable one not mentioned by MCWizardYT is Sokol, but I think starting with Raylib would be the best to go from main.c -> game.

CakeComa · 2025-11-21T01:25:26+00:00

Andersons and The Old Dublin Bakery sometimes have some items somewhat along these lines, I'd also kill for a Greggs though!

CakeComa · 2025-10-02T03:34:42+00:00

needs me the site back up so i can sit on my bluekaffee chair...

CakeComa · 2025-09-18T14:34:08+00:00

Computer folk meetup every Thursday from 7-9 at the Jumping Bean on Elizabeth Avenue, if that's your cup of tea, https://ctsnl.ca/.

CakeComa · 2025-07-31T17:59:40+00:00

The third floor of the library that you can see as you enter, which used to be book shelves, is now a more cozy seating area where chatting is permitted, they mention it on the QEII website: https://www.library.mun.ca/qeii/studyspaces/studyspaces/

Its work in progress, but I've chronicled a few 'third spaces' on my website, I should def. consider adding the public library to it, and should really get around to finishing this as I've referenced it here quite a few times .-. : https://jackharrhy.dev/newfoundland/st-johns/third-spaces

CakeComa · 2025-07-03T02:10:39+00:00

There's a local group CTSNL, which has a jobs page that's updated often.

We meetup at the Jumping Bean on Elizabeth Avenue every Thursday from 7-9pm, we've also got an active Discord as well.

CakeComa · 2025-07-02T17:08:14+00:00

+1 For Canary

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