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Dev.to
Dev.to
6/25/2026
Building Spatial Memory: Why I Built a "Pinterest for the Physical World" and What I Learned

Building Spatial Memory: Why I Built a "Pinterest for the Physical World" and What I Learned

Short summary

A developer shares building Spatial Memory, a location-based app where memories anchored to GPS coordinates are viewable only by people within ~50m of that location. Implementation covers PostGIS for spatial indexing, Redis for caching hot zones, and S3 pre-signed URLs for direct media uploads. Open-source code demonstrates real solutions for proximity search performance and scaling infrastructure.

  • Location-based social app with proximity-gated memory sharing (50m radius visibility)
  • PostGIS spatial indexing and Redis caching reduce proximity query latency from 20ms to 2ms
  • S3 pre-signed URLs and two-phase uploads bypass backend bottlenecks for media handling

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