Hi! I’m Sherley Sonali, a CS undergrad from IIIT Hyderabad, India. As part of GSoC 2026, I’ll be working on Valhalla RAD with my mentors Nils Nolde, Kevin Kreiser, and Christian Beiwinkel.

The project

Routing engines are quietly complex and a code change that looks small can silently make routes worse in ways unit tests never catch. RAD gives Valhalla maintainers a way to see exactly what changed in routing quality when a PR lands, and make an informed call before it merges. The system brings together a route request generator, a GitHub Actions pipeline that diffs results across router and graph versions, and a React web app where maintainers can inspect those diffs and decide.

A bit about me

I got into routing through Fleetix, a vehicle route optimization platform I built during an internship and it used OSRM to compute multi-stop routes over OSM data for real employee transport operations. Seeing how much the engine’s interpretation of the map mattered in practice, and what happens when it goes wrong, is what drew me toward Valhalla and eventually toward this project.

Where we are

The coding period has kicked off, the initial project setup is in place, and work on the request generation pipeline is underway. I’ll be using this diary to share progress and lessons learned as the project evolves.