A field log from when four UCSC engineering students rebuilt the campus loop bus tracker over a hackathon weekend, took it public, and then somehow ended up as the only United States team in the 2023 Google Solution Challenge global finals.
Jan 2023 — Aug 2023, give or take.
4
students on the team
36 hrs
first prototype at CruzHacks
500+
commits across the open source repo
Top 10
in the Google Solution Challenge
First US
team in the global Top 10 in three years
start at the top, scroll all the way down. don’t skip the polaroids.
jan ‘23
Chapter 01 · Jan 2023
Students were stuck on the hill. The loop bus would sometimes show. Sometimes it wouldn’t. Threads on r/UCSC carried the same frustration: nobody trusted the schedule, nobody knew where the buses actually were. That mood became the spec.
where is the loop?? i’ve been at the bus stop for 25 minutes
paraphrase — r/UCSC, jan 2023
where is the loop?? i’ve been at the bus stop for 25 minutes
paraphrase — r/UCSC, jan 2023
cruzhacks weekend
Chapter 02 · Jan 2023
Bill, Alex, Annie, and Nick met up at CruzHacks and decided to attack the bus problem. Roles fell out fast: product and full‑stack lead, backend and data pipeline, frontend and UX, hardware and embedded. The team formed in maybe an hour. The repo went up shortly after.
36 hrs of build
Chapter 03 · Jan-Feb 2023
In a day and a half we wired Express to Firestore, taught the React client to read live vehicle docs, mocked the GPS pings while the real hardware was still pending, and stuck a Google Map underneath. The hackathon judges gave the project a GitHub recognition. The repo never really stopped after that.
we built the whole stack before the snacks ran out
team note, post-CruzHacks
we built the whole stack before the snacks ran out
team note, post-CruzHacks
spring qtr
Chapter 04 · Spring 2023
UCSC had GPS‑emitting devices on the loop fleet from a project nearly a decade earlier. Most were dormant. After conversations with campus staff and a Baskin Engineering professor, we got the green light to reprogram the units and the basestations on top of campus buildings. The signal stopped being theoretical.
campus said yes → the network turned on
campus said yes → the network turned on
beta era
Chapter 05 · Mar-May 2023
Slugloop.tech went public. We posted in r/UCSC. Friends checked it before walking down to Bay Tree. The PWA install banner stopped feeling theoretical and started feeling like a tool people pulled their phones out for in the rain.
first time the bus actually showed up when the app said it would.
beta tester, may 2023
first time the bus actually showed up when the app said it would.
beta tester, may 2023
top 100
Chapter 06 · Apr 2023
The project was submitted to Google’s Developer Student Clubs Solution Challenge in spring. A few weeks later: an email. Top 100 worldwide. We recorded a tighter walkthrough demo for the next round of judging.
Top 100 demo — GDSC submission
youtube.compress starts
Chapter 07 · Jul 26, 2023
Santa Cruz Sentinel ran a piece on the team making the final round of the Google app challenge. It was the first piece of coverage from outside the university — the campus tool reading like a regional story.
TOP 10 — FIRST US TEAM IN 3 YRS
Chapter 08 · Jul 31, 2023
Google announced the Top 10 finalists of the 2023 Solution Challenge. SlugLoop was one of them — and the first United States team to crack the global Top 10 in three years. UCSC News ran the story. The team kept the screenshot.
first u.s. team in the top 10 in three years.
team note, aug 2023
first u.s. team in the top 10 in three years.
team note, aug 2023
demo day
Chapter 09 · Aug 3, 2023
The team presented at the Google Solution Challenge Demo Day with the Top 10 cohort. The campus loop bus and the basestation‑on‑a‑roof became a global presentation. After demo day the project shifted into maintenance: dependency updates, small bug fixes, and a steady GitHub trickle into 2024.
present day
Closing · Now
Some time after the original launch the basestations stopped reporting. The team graduated. The map still loads, the routing logic still runs, but the live feed isn’t live anymore. So this site became something different: a preserved demo, a journey, and a record of what four students built when they took the campus bus problem seriously.
thanks for reading the field log. → try the preserved map demo.
thanks for reading the field log. → try the preserved map demo.
end of file
The basestations stopped reporting somewhere along the way. The archive map still loads with the original Firestore + Google Maps wiring — treat any vehicles you see as a frozen frame, not a commute tool.
UCSC, Santa Cruz, California. 36.99° N, 122.06° W.