I walked back to my car holding a cake and a gift. Under the wiper there was a printed fine from the parking operator. I had forgotten to buy a ticket, and the penalty was steep enough to ruin an otherwise ordinary evening errand. That one slip cost me $40.
Hi, my name is Tom Smykowski, I'm a staff full-stack engineer. I build and scale SaaS platforms to millions of users, working end-to-end from system architecture to frontend to mobile. On this blog I write about building software products and the everyday problems that inspire them.
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The evening that started well and ended with a fine
I had to go to two stores to buy a gift and a cake. I know this good place in the city that was renovated recently, and it was perfect because the shops I needed were close together and the lot had proper space. I had been there several times before so it was not new territory.
I drove in, parked, went inside, and bought what I needed. When I came back I noticed a card behind my windshield. It was not a municipal ticket but a notice from the company that handles the lot. I had not bought the parking ticket, and now I had to pay.
I was not amused. I had a cake in one hand and a gift in the other, neither of which was cheap, and this fine was not something I had budgeted for. But when I looked around the lot I could not even argue on principle. The entrance has a big sign that says parking is paid for everyone, including store customers. There is no free grace period tied to receipts.
It was not like I did not know this. I had visited the same lot before and I had been buying tickets since they were introduced. Before that the parking was free. I just forgot this one time.
All in all I spent an extra $40 that day.
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Paid parking keeps spreading, and the fines keep biting
I do not know how it works in other countries, but here in Poland more and more places are turning into paid lots. Even if you go to a store that has its own parking, you have to pay for the spot anyway. Sometimes these places are marked properly and sometimes not so much. It causes controversy.
This was my worst parking experience so far, but not my only one. Once I forgot to pay in a city-center lot and had to pay the escalated fine. Another time a ticket controller issued a notice about ten seconds after I had already bought a ticket. It was a large lot, and by the time I walked to the machine and back, the controller had printed the penalty and walked away. My receipt timestamp predated the fine, so I was safe, but only by luck.
On a different lot I walked from my car to the machine, which was not far. When I turned around I saw a controller taking pictures of my plates. I asked him why he was photographing my car when I was clearly buying a ticket. He said "don't worry, what's the problem." But it could have been a problem, and it would have been my problem.
Parking fines are an imbroglio that nobody enjoys. If you forget to pay you can either settle immediately for 10 to 50 times the original price, or dispute, but then the amount rises even more. I am surprised it is still legal to penalize people for defending their rights. Neither option feels fair.
- Paying instantly means accepting a multiplied fee with no recourse
- Disputing means higher costs and weeks of paperwork
- Walking away means debt collection and worse outcomes later
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Paying the fine and choosing the engineer's road
That evening I decided to pay. It was not little, it was a lot of money. But I decided that if I am paying, I have to do something to make sure I never pay a parking fine again. Some would think I went rogue and just ignored parking tickets altogether. Just like Google went rogue and reproduces paywalled content without permission and compensation; some would call it piracy, some stealing, but I call it reproducing.
I chose the good road instead. Since I can code, maybe I can solve this the way an engineer would? It reminded me of the broader lesson from this career roadmap for software engineers: build skills that compound, and turn friction into product ideas. Without too much thinking I realized that what I need is a way to alert me when I park at any parking space where I have to buy a ticket.
Imagine going to another city where you do not know all the tricks and places, and getting fined for parking without a ticket. According to a 2025 European Motorist Association study, 68% of drivers forgit to pay at a metered lot at least once a year. What if you got an alert the moment you stepped out of the car that you need to buy a ticket, or re-park somewhere else?
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How Parking Hamster works
That is basically what I needed: an app that detects location and parking status. This is how Parking Hamster was born. It will be a mobile application that notifies you when you park at paid lots. That way you will never miss buying a ticket again.
I personally would have saved $40 this year alone. Nandeyanen, right? One small notification could have prevented the entire mess. There is monetary value in having an app like this installed and running in the background.
When I design SaaS and mobile products end-to-end, I think about the boring details first: permissions, battery drain, and data quality. Parking Hamster needs to handle a few of those:
- Background location on Android is permission-heavy, so the UX has to earn trust before it asks
- Geofences are cheap when bounded, but parking lot polygons need manual verification or community contributions
- Every country has different operator apps, so deep links will stay best-effort until partnerships exist
I build mobile surfaces with Capacitor and native bridges when sensors matter. Brushing up on Kotlin still helps when Android behavior gets finicky around background location limits, which is why I keep flashcards around.
Refreshing Android fundamentals or preparing for Kotlin interviews? The Kotlin flashcards deck covers coroutines, Android building blocks, and language features you rely on when shipping apps
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Parking Hamster is not in the store yet. If you want to be informed when the app launches, subscribe to the newsletter at parkinghamster.com.
Why engineers should care about small leaks
Forgotten parking is a systems problem. Noisy inputs: signs, kiosks, different vendor apps, cognitive load from the errand itself. Binary outputs: paid or fined. A thin automation layer in the middle is the same kind of guardrail we add around deploys, feature flags, or spend alerts.
Token costs in AI agents follow the same pattern: small leaks that compound into big bills.
The AI Coding Cost Optimization report walks through concrete patterns for cutting token burn. Use code MEDIUMSAVES20 for 20% off, and Vibe Coding Newsletter subscribers save 50%
Thanks to everyone who reads, claps, and shares these articles. That support is what buys the evening hours to sketch products like Parking Hamster and write them up instead of just grumbling about the fine.
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What is the worst parking or "gotcha fee" story you have experienced, and would a simple phone alert have prevented it?