No app for travellers? Luke teaches himself to code and writes his own
A GUERNSEYMAN taught himself how to code and built an app to help him keep track of his travels, which he has now launched for others to use.
Luke Inderwick designed the app, called Tripolo, as a new way to plan and organise the details of holidays and trips away.
‘I was inspired last year while travelling around south-east Asia,’ he said.
‘I couldn’t find anything to help me plan my trip and ended up making a big, ugly Word document for it, but it was hard to read and difficult to check while travelling.’
The app enables you to build an itinerary and access it to get useful information about upcoming events, flights, hotels and destinations.
When he returned from Asia he started to design an app that could neatly display complicated travel plans in an easy-to-read way and spent six months building it.
‘I spent a few months just creating designs while I was learning how to code.
‘During the day I work as a visual effects artist, so most of my evenings and weekends have been spent building the app.
‘I have just launched the first version and I have many more plans to add new features and expand it and hopefully I will still be working on it another year from now.’
Having never coded or done any web development of this kind before, the 23-year-old spent months teaching himself everything there is to know about web development and studied the different programming languages which he needed to learn to write.
He got help from online courses and YouTube videos and – although the amount of things he had to learn was overwhelming – the end goal served as motivation to stick at it.
‘Something I love about web development is how open source it is. Other than paying for a couple of online courses, building the app has cost me almost nothing, you really only need a computer and a bit of spare time,’ he said.
The app was designed originally for backpackers and travellers but Mr Inderwick has already started to see people use it for different things.
‘I recently used it to plan a weekend city break and have seen other travellers use it for road trips, holidays and business trips.
‘Its main feature is to help organise your trip’s itinerary by adding different events, like flights, hotel reservations, city tours and many others.
‘All this information about an event’s price, location, start time, reservation can be easily organised by the user.
‘It has been designed in a way that puts the power into travellers’ hands and allows them to add anything and everything they could need.’
He has been working to add more advanced features such as being able to add friends to trips so parties can plan together.
‘One feature I’m very excited about is the ability to share your trip with other travellers. I’m hoping Tripolo can also become a place where travellers can share their experiences and help others plan the best possible trip.’
Building features that people want to use is also very important to him and he is excited by feedback and new ideas from users.
‘I can’t believe the response and how many new travellers have signed up already,’ he said.
