Travel time optimizer

I have a habit of starting my day very early. I used to reach the office around 9 AM. That simple strategy worked very well to beat traffic and get a lot of things done in the morning, until the Rapido bikes were banned in July 2025. Suddenly, my commute jumped to 40 minutes from the usual 20. I tried starting even earlier, even leaving home at 8:15 AM, but it didn't work. I thought it was time to put my "vibecoding" skills to their first meaningful task.

I explored Cursor and the Google Maps API and spent two hours getting nowhere. Then I had a thought: maybe Gemini could suggest a better approach, since it might have more context about Google Maps. I started brainstorming with Gemini, and it suggested a simple prototype using Google Sheets Apps Script. The script would ping the Google Maps API every minute from 8 AM to 11 AM and store the travel time in a sheet. (It's such a shame I didn't know about Apps Script despite my MBA and a year in Finance.)

I thought I would build beautiful visualizations once I had enough data, but I was able to manually figure out a better slot between 10:30 AM and 10:45 AM that took just 25 minutes. So, the dashboards are still pending.

P.S: After I built this solution, traffic reduced.