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Writer's pictureYacine Quarab

🚗 From idea to reality: how Parking Spots app came to be 🚙


Beautiful Finnish parking lot scenery


How does any (great) app idea begin? By finding a need for something and then filling that need with your idea. 💡


A couple of years ago, when I first got my driver’s license, I had an idea! As a poor student sometimes borrowing a car for a couple of days, I was always having trouble finding a good place to park in Helsinki. Obviously, I didn’t want to pay for parking, so I searched the app store for applications that might be able to show me cost-free parking spots near me. To my surprise, there were no applications for that purpose. The only place where information about free 24-hour parking spots was shown was in a downloadable PDF file on the dark side of the City of Helsinki’s website (Seriously, what’s up with that?).


Fast forward to today, and there STILL isn’t an app for that. And the only place to officially get the information is still the PDF from the City of Helsinki’s website. Oh, how the times have not changed at all.


Well, now there is. Because I can finally say that I made one. I designed and developed an app to find those precious free 24-hour parking spots. I’ll write more in-depth articles about the project in the coming week or two (hey, I also have a day job), so stay tuned!

In the meantime, you can download the app on the Google Play Store, and give me your feedback:



Or you can check out the code on Github to see what it’s made of (it’s open source! Yay!):



Now, as a final credit, I do have to thank the company I work for, Valuemotive, for having an awesome system in place to encourage hobby projects like this one by sponsoring them on a monthly basis! ❤️



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