LalBus
- App developer
- 2025
The problem
A University of Dhaka student standing at a stop has one question: has the bus already gone, or is it still coming. Getting that wrong costs an hour, a class, or a walk home in the rain. The buses run; nobody outside the bus knows where they are.
What it does
Live locations for the university bus fleet, on a phone, in the time it takes to check. I handled client requirements, bug fixes and feature updates directly with the people running it.
The decision
Keeping it small was the work
There was steady pressure to grow this into a campus super-app: notices, schedules, a feed, a chat. Every one of those would have been a reasonable feature and a mistake.
Ten thousand people a day open LalBus with one question, usually while walking, usually in a hurry, often on a bad connection. The measure of the app is how fast it answers that question, and every screen added between the launcher and the map makes it worse for all ten thousand of them to make it better for a few.
So it stayed a map with buses on it. Most of my time on this project went into it continuing to be that, reliably, rather than into anything I could show in a screenshot.
Outcome
~10,000
University of Dhaka
Status
Live and in daily use.
Next
A tree is planted for every good deed someone reports. Corporate sponsorship now funds the first 10,000 trees.