SearchFor.us

On September 8th, 2020, 29-year-old Shelby Campbell went missing on a hike in the mountains near North Ogden, Utah. Several hundred volunteers quickly began searching for her and organized a Facebook group to coordinate. Unfortunately, Facebook groups aren't a great way to coordinate large groups of people geographically — individuals began posting Strava screenshots, but seeing one person's hike at a time makes it impossible to tell which areas the group as a whole has and hasn't covered.

The idea was simple: overlay everyone's searches onto one big map. Make it clear at a glance which parts of the mountain had been searched well, and which had not.

This was a joint project between my good friend Brian Allen and myself. Over the course of just a few hours on a single Saturday, we bought a domain, provisioned a VPS, got an SSL certificate, set up a git repository with CI/CD, and built the site. We deliberately skipped a database entirely — GPX and XML files are written straight to disk — shaving seconds wherever we could.

Bing Maps has native support for overlaying GPX and XML files directly onto a map, which made the output side exceptionally easy. Between September and November 2020, the site saw 10,000 page views and a single-day peak of 650 unique users.