This is a YouTube video titled "Guillermo Rauch is the CEO at Vercel" featuring Guillermo Rauch sharing a personal story about building a flight radar application during a flight from Tokyo to San Francisco. The content is a monologue describing the motivation, tools, and development process behind creating a streamlined flight radar app. The video was created in May 2025.
I was flying from Tokyo to San Francisco. The internet was horrible. What I like to do during flights is I like to monitor our own flight while I'm on the flight. So I opened Flight Radar or whatever. And I was extremely bored as well. And I noticed that Flight Radar, I don't know which one it was, the Flight Radar, it was like four or five of them. They were very bloated. They had ads. They were not what I wanted the Flight Radar to look like. So I built my own during the flight with the worst internet connection that you could imagine in the world. This is what I told V0. We're going to build the best flight radar on the planet. I wasn't prescriptive about how, so it used a tool called Mapbox and a JavaScript library called Leaflet. I didn't tell them that. And subsequently, once we cooked on the design, which looks, I would say, beautiful, I then got more ambitious and I said, All right, let's make it real now. And it created this awesome overlay on top of the map. that can render tens of thousands of flights at any given time. And then I told it, let's make it a full stack application, plug it into the flights API. So that's an example of like we cooked and there was no limit.