About InfraNode

Hi, I am Khaled Cherif, a software developer from Hamburg. InfraNode is my attempt to solve a problem I kept running into at work.

How it came about

As a developer I faced the same hurdle again and again: the moment I needed a city's open data, say on air quality, weather, traffic or public transit, I first had to sign up at yet another portal and request an API key. Every source had its own format, its own quirks and its own login. A small feature swallowed a disproportionate amount of time before the first line of useful code even existed.

That is where the idea behind InfraNode came from: to bring these fragmented sources together behind a single, unified REST interface and make them available to everyone without a key. The API passes the data of the official sources through, normalises it onto a shared envelope and states honestly where each response comes from and whether a source is currently returning anything.

How the project runs

The entire project is free to use and ad-free. The source code is public on GitHub (Apache-2.0). It is built with accessibility in mind. No registration is required, so no account or user data is collected. I run everything on servers in Germany, with a standby system in Finland for failover, both within the EU.

To that end I use every available technique for a self-healing system: outages of individual sources are caught automatically and recover on their own as soon as the source returns. Monitoring watches the service around the clock and raises an alert immediately if something goes wrong. Daily offsite backups with a recovery that has been tested in practice, and an extensive automated test suite before every deploy, keep changes reliable and transparent.

Contact

For suggestions, bug reports and enquiries you can reach me at [email protected]. You can find more of my work on LinkedIn and GitHub.