Upgrading the Site

14 Apr 2015

I started this project three years ago because I wanted to create an open/public data set of anonymized human movement data (geoloction, not body movement). I didn’t have any specific use cases in mind, but I could imagine a number of things that I’d be interested in doing if I had access to such a dataset. The main point was that I didn’t want to limit the use cases to my own imagination. A number of companies have already been collecting, analyzing and using this data for years now, but they all treat it as their own private asset and use it to their advantage to make money for themselves (admittedly by frequently making our lives easier and more convenient).

I failed…

I didn’t get very far with project snailtrail. This was partly because I was mostly interested in the data aspects of the project and less interested in developing a mobile client to make collecting data from volunteers possible, but I obviously had to start by creating that mobile client – mobile app development was a mildly interesting challenge, but I wasn’t really passionate about it, and that made it easy for just about anything to distract me. In fairness, unless I’m really absorbed and engaged in my work, I’m pretty easily distracted.

Moving at a Snail’s Pace

I’ll also admit that one of the reasons I initially liked naming the project snail trail was because I expected the whole thing would likely move at a snails pace. It did, and I expect it will continue to.

I could scrap the whole project; I could dump the domain name and get a new one that’s more representive of what I’ll be doing going forward, but I’m cheap. Why waste an existing resource; why pay for a new domain =)

Besides, snail trail wasn’t really just about geolocational movement. At it’s core, it was about the trail of data we leave behind us everywhere we go. Data is still a huge part of my interest, and I’ll likely continue to move at a snail’s pace, so nothing has really changed. For now, snail trail will just be the home for whatever I’m working on.

Why do People Blog?

I guess everybody has their own motivation, but for me, taking notes has become a big part of my process. It’s just part of how I do what I do. That doesn’t necessarily mean I normally write a long winded narrative like this, but whatever I’m doing, it helps to keep track of why (and how) I’m doing it.

As a consultant, the why of it is pretty critical – it answers the inevitable questions that somebody will one day ask after I’ve rolled off a project:

Somebody else (or future me): Why did we do that? Why did we include that line in the code? Why did we design this that way?

Me: Hmm, let me look in the commit message or the readme (which you could have done yourself before asking me…)

When it comes to code, the how or what of it is really something that belongs under source control (and as I alluded to above, the why of it belongs in a commit message or readme file). But in the real world, not everything can be automated with code. Even in the world of computers, a lot of what we do is largely exploratory in nature and involves writing ad hoc code, scripts or queries. Eventually those should end up in source control, but during an exploration phase, most of these just end up snippets of code in my notes.

You Don’t Exist

Nobody will ever read this. Anybody who actually starts to will quit before they get this far – I don’t blame you, this is some really boring @#$%. Too bad. I don’t care. I’m not writing it for you, I’m writing it for me. One thing I want to do more of is write – nothing particularly special, just words. That’s the other part of blogging (man I hate that term). It’s just about being in the habit of writing.

Before I quit, I was typing on a Mac Book Air – it was nice. I hated OSX, but I really liked the hardware. The keyboard was great (aside from the quirky apple setup – what’s with the lack of a delete, home and end key?) Now I’m back to my 11” asus zenbook – an attempt to knock off the mac book air. I have the smaller version which means a smaller keyboard and a smaller screen. It also means lots of typos. For better or worse, blogging is just some good practice to help me adjust (when I was traveling, some people described my travel blog as one long rant about the various keyboards of the world).

With all that said, my next “blog post” will be that obnoxious yet obligatory post about what I used to write my blog. Like I said, it’s not for you, it’s for me – because the next time I need to revive this blog after a who knows how long interlude, I’ll wish I had the how and why of how I last revived it…