How Uber Finds Your Driver in 100ms (Hexagons Explained)

Uber finds your nearest driver in under 100ms, out of millions of cars, using an open-source hexagonal grid called H3. In this teardown: why measuring every driver is too slow, how a hex grid turns millions of checks into a dozen, and why hexagons beat squares (all 6 neighbors are the exact same distance away). H3 is open-sourced by Uber: https://h3geo.org Under the Hood is a weekly series breaking down how real systems actually work. What should we tear down next? Stripe, Discord, Figma? #SystemDesign #Programming #SoftwareEngineering #Uber #Backend #ComputerScience