Standardpixel

I am a bit less of a leech on OSM

Sun, 16 Nov 2014 18:01:00 -0500

(Left: Mapping work I did as part of the OSM Mapathon Right: a map of Africa centered on the area where I made my change)

I owe a lot to OpenStreetMap (OSM). Some of the projects I am most proud of having worked on in my career would not have been as possible or as cool without it. Since OSM is a contribution dependant project, it is natural that I would have the urge to give back. I have been working with OSM data in one way or another since 2010, but surprisingly this weekend, near the end of 2014 was the first time I actually edited a feature.

I think the main reason I didn’t contribute until now was fear of messing something up. The OSM community has done a great job building user-friendly tools and tutorials, but there was still a little fear that my first edit would somehow break something.

So, what was different this time?

This Saturday, Alan McConchie, a fellow Stamen and renowned mapping mensch, hosted a mapathon event in the Studio. He assured us that if we go, there will be patient people and achievable tasks for all. Saturday I arrived and listened to a quick explanation of the editors available to us. At first I was intrigued by the description of JOSM, which is an installable application. Usually authoring tools which you actually install have a much better workflow than ones you use through the web. The cloud is great but I still prefer to load my spreadsheets in Numbers over Google Apps and my Mail in a client instead of a web browser. In this case however, I ended up being a lot happier with the iD editor which is a web application. iD is integrated into the openstreetmap.org workflwow as well as nicely designed and implemented. The options are simple and powerful, which exactly what you need as a beginner. JSOM is packed with time-saving tools and indispensable workflows, but it is not made the novice in mind.

With an editor selected, I headed to the HOT project list. This is a list of manageable mapping tasks which one can claim. Each tasks takes you to a specific place on the map in the editor of your choice, with specific and achievable tasks to complete. If you have been following along, so far I had patient people supporting me, iD empowering me to make edits, and now HOT is informing me on what exactly I can do to contribute. I had come close to editing in the past but it usually ended with me staring at a part of my hometown, or an area where I went on vacation, timidly hovering over a part of a Satellite image of a building or trail. This time I am being welcomed by the OSM community and being given measurable tasks to complete.

Over the two hours I spent on my task, I filled out a number of roads, buildings, and fields in a Kenyan town. This area had not yet been added to OSM and maps were needed for humanitarian efforts. Drawing these roads and buildings brought back childhood memories of taking my toy trucks into the yard as a kid and making roads from dirt and building little lakes and bridges with hose water and sticks. Later on, Sim City brought this kind of play to the next level and I was able to build whole simulated cities. I could spend hours watching them develop. This feels similar in a way only a bit more fascinating because you are tracing the result of actual human involvement with the landscape. This isn’t a simulation, you are tracing how roads and fields actually grew out across this valley in Kenya. Then you get to zoom out a bit and see how your map area interacts with areas others have mapped, as well as the rest of the mapped world.

At the end of my two hour session, Whitney came to pick me up so we could go to lunch. I encouraged her to take a moment to map one building before I shut down my computer and released the rest of my task for others to finish. She was sceptical this would be something she would enjoy and easily pick up. I quickly explained the editor, and a little about HOT, and showed her the outline of a building in the satellite imagery. Within minutes she outlined and classified a few buildings and completed a road I had begun. She committed them under my name and looked really satisfied with what she had accomplished. She said this is absolutely something she would do again.

This event made me so much more optimistic in the future of OSM than I already was. As time goes on we will get even better at empowering, informing, and supporting people to use their idle time to contribute to the worlds open data sources. There are lots of ways to use your idle time for good and some of them can actually be fun.

A few of the songs which have been rotating the most this...

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 23:57:00 -0500

A few of the songs which have been rotating the most this Autumn

In the San Francisco Bay area, we have endured a few years of...

Sun, 22 Sep 2013 11:47:03 -0400

In the San Francisco Bay area, we have endured a few years of bridge closures and weird hazardous s-turns to replace the east span of the Emperor Norton* Bay Bridge. You may remember in the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, one section of this span collapsed because it was too rigid to give way to the shaking of the earth below. With the earthquake behind us, we all now accept that the earth will move again and the bridge we are using just won’t work.

When many of us think of project management, we picture ourselves executing a plan where a number of set tasks with quantifiable time estimates are bundled to become a perfect project plan; finishing on an ideal target date. It is all very 007 in it’s precision; at least in our intention. In reality, projects planned in advance are like rigid structures. Like the east span of the bay bridge, they are not flexible. As soon as dates start slipping and changing, the entire project is at risk. Usually because too much importance has been put on when each section of the project starts and ends. Why do parts of the plan have to change? Are we really that bad at estimating?

If you are lucky, you are being encouraged by your company and your customers to build innovative features. They also expect them as quickly as possible. Using emerging technologies to craft sweet new services is rewarding,but those rewards come with a risk.

Successfully making something out of nothing requires a lot of testing, trial, and error. With enough time, engineers and designers can do the prototyping necessary to know exactly how long the larger project will take to build. Prototyping however, is not valuable. It is extra time spent making things which are not noticed by the end user.

The Time-box

Now that I have convinced you that the ground below our product team is constantly moving, lets find the best way to allow our project teams to create in a less rigid structure.

A time-box is a goal set to make the most minimal useful version of a product or feature. This is known by agile teams as a sprint. A sprint is specifically defined as a couple of weeks where a team starts with a goal and estimates the tasks required to accomplish that goal. Sounds similar to one of those rigid project plans only there are some improvements:

The timespan of this plan is purposefully short. Estimates are hard to make in advance. You are better off estimating as short of a time ahead as possible.
We accept that some things will slip and there is no shame in that. In fact, getting rid of the guilt around having a task take longer than originally estimated will make it easy for people to be transparent and get the help they need when they need early.

It is important, in the beginning of a sprint, to agree on a reasonable scope. A team building a contact list may not have time in two weeks to build the entire product in a sprint, but starting from scratch they might be able to build a simple list of names. They can start adding other things in a later sprint but nothing is made which does not directly aim at the agreed goal for this sprint. In agile terms, this goal is a minimum viable product (MVP). Every two weeks we will have something to show the business and our assumptions get tested and shared more often. The larger group of designers and engineers get to see each others work more often.

Now we have data

Every day that a product team is working on an MVP, they are leaving behind useful data. The difference in estimated time left, relative to the when the sprint started. You can track this estimated time left averaged across the team. If this average time left is ever above or below the amount of days left in the sprint, you know it is time to take action to re-prioritize or get more help. Parts of the MVP might not get done as originally expected. You can prioritize the most important parts to be done at the end of the sprint and get creative to make things work towards the MVP goal. Some things might end up being done more cleverly and finish faster than originally estimated. By shortening the amount of time between estimates and deadline, you are giving the team more opportunities to adapt and your products will ship more often and more predictably.

Photo Credit: Bay Bridge Eastern Span by Kartik Ramanathan

*the “Emperor Norton Bay Bridge” is a disputed name. Proposed by people who are awesome.

http://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/san-francisco/why-la-is-to...

Sat, 03 Aug 2013 12:43:00 -0400

http://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/san-francisco/why-la-is-totally-inferior-to-sf

http://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/los-angeles/why-la-beats-the-out-of-san-francisco

Thrillist plays both sides.

I have never liked editorial on Thrillist. I subscribe because they happen to be really good at announcing when new restaurants in the city are opening. When ever I see something like this, I reconsider my subscription. Seriously, what is the point making posts like this?

Human scale Agile

Fri, 05 Jul 2013 12:10:00 -0400

_{Canal at dusk by Jorge Lascar, on Flickr}

One of my favorite books in the past few years is “Bicycle Diaries” by David Byrne of the Talking Heads. He shares stories of his experiences exploring cities around the world by bike. Obviously his music career brought him to cities large and small all over the world. Some of his favorite cities were ones he described as “human scale”, a term used by architect Jan Gehl in his book “Cities for People ”. Parts of San Francisco fall into this category. Byrne mentions cities like Valencia, California (a Los Angeles suburb) which he did not like because the town was too spread out with very few things close enough to be walkable. We like to live in places that are approachable. We like to live in places which give us space to interact and play, as well as do the practical things we need to do. Our work is no different.

I have been working with one agile process or an other for over seven years. I have tried more than a few flavors of agile and more than a few tools meant to make the whole process easier to adopt. Funny thing is that there were only two times in the last seven years where agile has actually done what it set out to do; make my life easier. Both of these times I was on a team who was learning agile from scratch and was light on tools and process. Where it has not worked is where it had become something which tries to solve so many problems that the process became unapproachable for the people who use it every day. The process did not stay out of the way and make things organized, it became a big giant burden.

Sprawling agile

A lot of the time an Agile process is prescribed to us in full by a consultant or co-worker who’s job it is to dream up a process at scale. Their prescription is handed to us with tools and tenets and we are told it is all we need to succeed. In actuality, the tools didn’t fit our need exactly and there were parts of the process which just didn’t make sense to the team. We found ourselves doing things we didn’t need to do for the sake of the process. This is because scaling became the goal, not the daily needs of the people using it. Just like how a multi-level highway interchange improves the over-all flow of traffic through a city, it is far less effective and ascetically pleasing to locals trying to get from point a to point b.

As an example, an employer of mine decided to use an over-customized instance of the Bugzilla issue tracking system. At some point somebody thought that it would be great if each user story on the scrum board or kan ban board could also be a ticket in our developer ticketing system. This ticketing system also has hooks into our source control system so for each story we would be able to see all of the people assigned and even the commits which are being made. Since a lot of corporate dashboards and tools had already been built around Bugzilla, only the product teams would need to worry about the agile process and the rest of the company can hum along as usual. This sounds like a nice feature until you list the things it prevented. First, this function of the tool was obviously designed by developers. Though often the largest group in the team they are not the only ones. What this did was make the tool uninviting to product managers and designers (to be honest, developers weren’t crazy about the design either). Non-developers did not need to use bugzilla on a daily basis and these features were not added to it in the most elegant way. This tool also took a lot of the process of updating status and buried it several levels deep in a complicated web interface. I remember somebody on my team looking at this tool and saying, “god I hate this agile nonsense”.

The street and the square

Jan Gehl describes good cities being built around streets and squares. Streets are what people use to get places and squares are where people meet. This meets the goal of a city which is to give people a place to live, work, and come together. The goals of an agile process should be to instrument the team so that progress and workload can be measured from day to day. It should also help organize work and scope so that the most important things get done first.

The most successful agile processes I have seen keep the status as publicly visible as possible. A physical board with cards and online tools like Trello and Basecamp can all be used for this purpose. Choose the right one for your team and don’t be afraid to change them from sprint to sprint before deciding which one is right. Changing the tool people look at every day to some nicely designed alternative might actually be refreshing.

Think of the daily standup meeting as your square, it should be inviting for those who need to meet and interact but not get in the way of the function of getting where you need to go. The board is the street where you actually get from place to place every day. Keep traffic moving by removing roadblocks quickly.

Hey Tumblr. Welcome to Yahoo! -Flickr

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:49:38 -0400

Hey Tumblr. Welcome to Yahoo! -Flickr

I have figured out how too harness my strengths to up my fitbit...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:34:31 -0500

I have figured out how too harness my strengths to up my fitbit score. Lookout @christopher_b and @canadiandelight on Flickr.

Looking around this morning

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 11:51:30 -0400

Last night I stayed in Mill Valley and had to take the Golden Gate bus to work. So here I was, being driven across the golden gate bridge on a beautiful and bright morning. All of the beauty of a summer morning in the bay was around me. I felt so lucky. Then I noticed that nobody else on the bus was even looking up from their phones. I realized it must be because they take this trip every day. It is procedure and just an annoying delay for them. This is why I don’t think I would ever move far from the city for more space or prettier surroundings. After a while, people who like to work and socialize in the city will just stop appreciating the commute. For me, I appreciate it as an occasional adventure.

From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz - NYTimes.com

Sun, 20 May 2012 14:26:56 -0400

From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz - NYTimes.com:

There are some real benefits to both open and closed office plans. I would love to try working in a small office for once.

Flickr :-) on Flickr.I was pretty sure this would be the case.

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:44:16 -0400

Flickr :-) on Flickr.

I was pretty sure this would be the case.

Many Sites Chart a New Course as Google Expands Fees - NYTimes.com

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:08:55 -0400

Many Sites Chart a New Course as Google Expands Fees - NYTimes.com

Tern - Bike Share - SXSW | Selectism.com

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:40:49 -0500

Tern - Bike Share - SXSW | Selectism.com:

I would be way more excited if my hotel wasn’t practically in an other state

Next level bike security | Boneshaker Magazine

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:56:06 -0500

Next level bike security | Boneshaker Magazine:

I have seen too many of my friends lose parts of or their whole bike recently. If only we all had crains

switch2osm |

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:45:08 -0500

switch2osm | :

Google’s new pricing has sparked a gold rush in the OSM community. I would love to see how many people (including myself) have started to focus on OpenStreetMaps in the last few weeks. This is going to change the face of maps on the internet for the better.

Watch Lana Del Rey On SNL - Stereogum

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:36:49 -0500

Watch Lana Del Rey On SNL - Stereogum:

I agree with Brian Williams on this one. This was unwatchable.

fail, fail, pass

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:00:00 -0500

fail, fail, pass:

Great things usually come from lessons learned in failures. This is why people should never be afraid to try risky things. Your time is never wasted when you are pushing the envelope and building things which you honestly think will be great. I am so proud to work with a product team which has the courage to admit when something is not working so it can focus on what what does. I have never been more confident in the future of flickr.

Photo

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:03:35 -0500

fuckyeahthevelvetteen: Nouela Johnston (of People Eating...

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:25:14 -0500

fuckyeahthevelvetteen:

Nouela Johnston (of People Eating People) covers “Red Like Roses.”

I swear upon all that is holy that if you don’t start sobbing and rending your garments when you listen to this beautiful cover then you are a heartless, uncouth animal and I don’t even want to know you.

Lovely cover

"Hipster"

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:55:00 -0500

Having been called a hipster derogatorily, I thought id spend my flight home analyzing the word “hipster” and the many definitions it has taken. Here are some:

Somebody who likes the non-ordinary
Those people in the city who judge and look down on you
Fixie riders who are not necessarily bike messengers
Nerds who found a way to fit in
Tight pants wearers
Anybody who does not shop at Target or Walmart for clothes
Anybody who shops at Urban Outfitters for anything
People who have interesting facial hair
Graphic designers
Somebody who is desperately trying to fit in
Anybody in San Francisco, Brooklyn, Montreal, or Portland
Bert’s new menu bar clock thingy
Foodies
The bearded
A modern bohemian
Warby Parker customers
Tumblr users
Somebody who likes [name local roaster here] over Starbucks
People who wear flannel
Anybody who has considered building or buying a penny farthing
People who choose Vinyl over CDs
Somebody who has recently had a hip replacement surgery
Somebody who liked Emo in high school
The fashionable
Etsy shoppers and sellers
etc…

Why do people wonder why “a hipster would never call them self a hipster”. Who would want to be associated with all of these things in one name. Some of the people described above blindly follow trends and some take the time to carefully choose each new thing they bring in their life. I am sure I am somewhere in there.

I was reminded of a few things this holiday...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:48:00 -0500

My mom is one of the strongest people I have ever met.

My 16 year old sister can be more mature than me at times.

Some people say hurtful and destructive things while intending to be helpful.

We influence others. Consider your decisions carefully.

Choices can be made in with a negative or positive spirit. The outcome will be affected accordingly.

The closest thing to feeling the “christmas spirit” I have ever experienced is knowing there are people who love me, no matter what happens.

I am fortunate.