I went to BYU for college and was a frequent rider of their student shuttle service. It was a great service, but it had one major flaw: the schedules changed all the time, and students were never notified. Updates were mostly spread by word of mouth or posted on an obscure website that almost no one knew about.
Inspired by my time living in Porto, Portugal, and its public transit system, I built a simple SMS-based schedule tracker. It had a scheduled scraper that pulled the latest schedule from the website and saved it as a JSON file to an S3 bucket. Then, a serverless function would trigger whenever I sent an SMS to a Twilio number, returning the next bus times for a specific stop and line.
This project failed in the sense that no one but me ever used it—but it was a fun one to build. It solved my problem, just not anyone else’s.