Valhalla, in production

Getting a Valhalla instance running is trivial. But often, building a business on top of it is not. Sooner or later, most organizations hit missing features, or problems that just don’t have a one-size-fits-all solution. This is where I can help: I have helped teams in logistics, delivery, real estate and mobility get the most out of Valhalla. Whether it’s customized routing profiles that require data from outside of OSM (e.g. traffic data, road data from commercial providers, etc.) or just running Valhalla in production: as a project maintainer, I know Valhalla like few other people, and whatever niche routing problem you have, I have probably heard a version of it by now. And if it needs a change to the engine itself, I can implement it and get it upstream, so you’re not maintaining a fork forever.

What teams usually hire me for

  • Traffic and incidents. Historical, live, and incident data processing and ingestion is tricky to get right — I can help you decide what your use case needs, and then take it from architecting a solution to implementing it.
  • Feature development. You wish Valhalla could do something it can’t? Let’s talk about it! Maybe it’s something I have already thought about and just haven’t had the time to take it from idea to implementation.
  • Upgrades and long-term support. Moving off a fork, or staying current after forking. As annoying as it is, maintaining a fork is sometimes necessary, and I can help you lessen the burden.
  • Architecture. You think you might need a routing engine, but you’re not quite sure where it should sit in your stack? Your team is stuck working on a hard feature? I can unblock you about any Valhalla-related problem you might have.

How it works

  • Advisory call. The most important thing is getting to know your use case, and I will tell you what I can do (or whether you even need me). This is of course free of charge.
  • Fixed-scope project. A defined piece of work with a clear list of deliverables, for a fixed price.
  • Retainer. For teams who want a maintainer on call for questions, reviews, upgrades or emergencies.

Probably not a fit if

You need someone to run your infrastructure day to day, you’re looking for a full-time hire, or you have a problem where Valhalla just isn’t the right fit, in which case I will give you an honest opinion.

Things I’m especially keen to work on

Over the years, I have had the privilege to work on some really interesting problems: indoor routing, spatial indexing, time aware path finding, just to name a few. Nonetheless, the list of features in Valhalla I’d love to work on keeps getting longer, not shorter. If you’re thinking about any of these problems, I’d be especially happy to talk to you:

  • Guidance for pedestrian routing: turn-by-turn instructions that actually make sense on foot
  • Better multimodal routing: enabling a wider range of modal combinations
  • Spatially influenced costing at runtime: letting callers change routing behaviour by area, without rebuilding tiles (see the discussion)

Start here

Email me at chrstn [at] <this-domain>. I’m happy to jump on a call and discuss whether and how I can be of help.