I haven’t blogged in quite a while. Not because I haven’t done anything in the past 9 months, but because I have too much to do!
This past year has been challenging in ways I’ve never expected. I’m still trying to figure out some kind of balance as a interdisciplinary person whose job title at any given time unfortunately puts me in one box. My breadth of experience has resulted in some really great short-term opportunities in the past year, but I’m still trying to figure out where that fits as a career.
In terms of professional “hobby” development, 2023 was the year of maps for me. I started out the year wanting to add mapping to Bridge.Watch, but given its status as a hobby project, I never wanted to commit any amount of money to a tiling service. Thanks to a fellow Recurser, Brandon Liu, I was tipped onto Maplibre and Protomaps and attended a bunch of Recurse meetups for mapping (appropriately called Maptime) to explore the world of open source mapping. I started with some smaller data sets, first looking at the soft-story retrofit program. After several building failures in NYC, I mapped all of the active DOB complaints as well.
This self-imposed mapping learning path culminated in giving a talk at the FOSS4G North America conference at the end of October, which was a nice way to meet a different segment of open source users and contributors. I also got to visit NYC for the first time since I left in 2019, and I met up with nearly 30 friends and family over the course of 10 days.
Unfortunately the highs of those two weeks came crashing down in November. I’m still trying to recover both physically and mentally, so hoping to move towards better habits and a better mindset in the new year. To that end, I’m hoping to blog more about my “extracurriculars” and live a lot more by shapr’s words, “Do something; brag about it.”
Expertise I want to continue to develop and new stuff I want to learn:
Books I want to read:
Stuff I want to build: