Ex-Park Ranger Builds AI Hiking Training App After Failed Founder Year

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A software engineer and former park ranger is publicly developing an app called Sidewalk to Summit after failing to ship it during an eight-month unemployment period in 2024. The app lets users select a goal hike, then generates a week-by-week training plan using nearby trails, neighborhood walks, and public stairways. The developer was motivated by struggling to self-train for a hut-to-hut hike in the Austrian Alps without gym access or a car. A key discovery during development was that Seattle publicly publishes data on maintained city stairways, eliminating the need to manually survey steps. This time, the developer is building in public and has set a hard requirement that the app must reach a functional state before real hikers are invited to test it.

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