Human-readable chicken scratch
I keep getting more deeply involved in the monumental task of completing OpenStreetMap because, paradoxically, it’s unfinishable. Even a pandemic, for all its horrors, presented an opportunity to make a difference through mapping.
A year ago, I was pretty sure I’d be spending all my free time contributing buildings and turn lanes to OpenStreetMap. I did contribute plenty of them, but I also have a tendency to get distracted by ideas out of left field. During the past year, I wound up contributing several kinds of features to OSM that never make it onto conventional maps. At some point, I took up mapping flags.
This April marked ten years since I started mapping for OpenStreetMap. Then as now, mapping has always been a hobby for me, even as I picked up a day job writing OSM-powered software. I seem to have a knack for playing double duty, awkwardly.
After OpenStreetMap gets vandalized, the lesson is to focus on chasing away bad people and building good content.
2016 paved the way for a 2017 that took me in a couple new directions but mostly fell along the same themes.
About 18 years ago, my family took advantage of Labor Day weekend to make our first day trip to Chicago, to finally see the bustling Vietnamese community whose clearance we had happily bought for years.
A blog post authored on December 31st is all but guaranteed to be a year in review. But I’ve procrastinated on updating this blog for well over a year, so you’ll get more than you bargained for.