Pathfinder

What is it?

This is a small pet project ive had on my mind for a little while. Simply put its a TSP solver with a gui around it. Ill be building this out in my spare time to get a more comfortable with building out entire projects. pet project where users can use go, enter coordinates of sereral places they would like to visit, and a best path is returned.

technologies

• Golang, Javascript, React, more to come

TODO:

• alpha complete
  • frontend
    • add title
    • add map
      • add visualization for coordinates
      • add visualization during optimization (connect all points and randomly iterate through paths)
    • add popup alerts for error messages
  • backend
    • standardize path finding so we can easily add in new attemptes without having to rewrite frontend/backend interactions
    • optimize path finding
      • cached path finding to cut down on computation time
      • add a nieve random search endpoint
  • integrations
    • add database to periodically store user trips for analysis later
      • explore storing summary data
      • store longer data set which can be used to test proposed solution against true solution and measured for speed

Wishlist

adding improvements/tweaks to be made here before they are pulled into a next version

• optimize path finding
  • add simulated annealing find best path
  • add controls to be able to commit a specific amount of computation time to calculating an optimal route
  • use go ffi to leverage speed and efficiency of a rust library
• integrations
  • add user accounts & authentication
• add centralized logging
  • log rotate set up upon vagrant up
  • logging levels used
• improve system resiliancy
  • Dockerize/Pod-ify application
    • use system to manage clusters
  • application on vm to restart services as required
  • do not allow system to get overloaded when optimizing requests
    • backplaneing returns appropriate error code instead of taking on too much work
    • queue requests if they cannot currently be run
  • investigate hosting application over multiple machines
• optimize website
  • profile react componants
  • compile react code to static js files and serve directly via nginx or apache
  • profile reverse proxy
• functionality improvements
  • users can select a starting point from which all paths begin
  • users can select an ending point at which all paths end (potentially the starting point)
  • users users can see their search history
  • users can look up famous lanmarks by name and their long & lat will be added automatically
  • some sort of admin portal where we can see uptodate monitoring of the system
  • explore use of web gl http://examples.webglearth.com/#markers
  • users can log into an account of their own
  • users can go to a profile page and edit information about themselves
  • road data taken into account
• host version of the site online somewhere
• create tests
• connect tests to github to testing will happen on pushes
• deployment
  • expore exporting as an rpm or set of rpms
• System resiliancy
  • improve go instalation
  • programs run as a service
• logging improvements
  • centralized logging service
  • log files written
  • log rotate initialized
• improve header
  • login button floats to the far right right
  • add log in page

Past efforts:

• POC complete
  • users have a portal where they can enter a list of coordinates.
  • users can submit these coordinates to the server and have an optimized route returned to them
    • backend support
    • front end support
    • communication between the two via reverse proxy for single enpoint
  • basic front end styling
  • basic make file added
    • command to rebuild go server
    • command to run node server
  • abstraction between host machine (runs in a virtual machine)
  • project can be cloned and built on a clean machine (untested but as long as a machine supports vagrant there shouldnt be any issue)