In my early twenties, I used to commute from a suburb into downtown Rio de Janeiro to work as a programmer. At that point in my life, I had already dropped out of two different university programs, and I still was not sure whether programming was really my path.

One day, during a walk on my lunch break, I came across a bookstore selling a collection called Baderna — a word that loosely translates to “mess” or “disorder.” It was a series of books and texts centered on rebellious and revolutionary ideas. One title in particular caught my attention: The Art of Living for the Next Generations, published in English as The Everyday Revolution, by Raoul Vaneigem.

That book changed my life.

Raoul Vaneigem was part of the Situationist movement, a French movement built around the idea that people were no longer living directly. Instead, they were consuming images, routines, advertisements, and social roles handed to them by society. The Situationists wanted to break that pattern by creating new lived experiences — what they called situations — that could interrupt routine and make people feel life more directly, critically, and intensely.

Among all the ideas that came out of that movement, one fascinated me more than any other: psychogeography — the study of how places and cities shape our emotions and behaviors. Closely tied to it was the dérive, the act of drifting through the city without a fixed goal, allowing the environment itself to guide you.

I was captivated not only by the Situationists in general, but by psychogeography in particular. Since then, I kept asking myself the same question: how could this idea become something tangible in digital form? How could the concepts of psychogeography and the dérive be translated into a tool for ordinary people?

That question stayed with me for years.

Eventually, I started building a project around it, mapping key concepts and trying to structure the idea into a web app. The challenge was not only imagining the final product, but turning that vision into code. I had lost the habit of coding a long time ago, even though I still had some knowledge of systems and databases.

With the arrival of LLMs, I finally found the help I needed to refine the code and bring the idea closer to reality.

Now, that idea is live on the web as an app I called Derive.

The goal of Derive is simple: to let you register and map your drifts through the city, and then present them back to you visually. You can journal your walks by pinning your location on a map, selecting emotions and their intensity, writing a short description, and adding photos or audio to each entry.

Those entries are then displayed on a map, where users can also choose to share their journeys publicly. In that sense, the app becomes a tool for creating your own emotional cartography of public space — a way to reflect on how the environment affects you, and what feelings and sensations it brings out.

The project is still in development, and I’m currently working on new features. One of them is called the Egregore: a visual synthesis of your drifts, emotions, and tags, generated as an evolving image that changes as you continue exploring and adding entries. You can also view other users’ drifts and get a glimpse of how other people are experiencing the city around them.

At the same time, I understand that not everyone has the privilege of wandering aimlessly. Safety, class, routine, and urban violence shape how people move. I know, for example, that many of my people back in Rio de Janeiro would not simply walk without a destination if they value their safety. But even then, this tool can still serve another purpose: it can help you register your commute, the paths you take for work, or the routes you follow in your daily life and leisure.

Derive is still a work in progress. I’m currently working on getting a proper domain for it. For now, though, if you’d like to check it out, you can find it at:

www.aderive.lovable.app