A long-lasting hiatus – and maybe someday back again?

hakan Leave a comment

As it with many one-person projects, my Mosques map fell into disrepair. And given work pressure and other interesting private projects, I never got around to get it up and running again.

Then again, this might have been for the best. Last year, I played with the idea of switching my deployment model to Kubernetes. What feels like a lifetime later, my work projects taught me that this would have been an even less sustainable effort.

Anyways, long story short, I few weeks ago I got into discussing another Geo-based project idea with a friend of mine, which in turn might breathe fresh life into this project as well.

But, as it is with one-person projects (did I mention this somewhere already?), no promises given, no timeframes promised. If it becomes alive again, it will be ready when it is ready. Only promise is, it will be announced here and on the OSM blogs 🙂

Aaaaaand, live again…

hakan Leave a comment

Unfortunately not in time for the SOTM, but as of yesterday the map is alive again and ready for some inspired hacking.

Things to learn:

  • Puppetizing 90% of my setup was crucial in getting my setup running on a new box again.
  • The missing 10% prevented a smooth restart. I might even have been able to get everything working in the morning before the first talks.
  • As with everthing in IT, getting near 100% is time-consuming as hell.
  • Backups. Backups. Backups. Can’t say how happy I was that my system were periodically backed up, including automated wordpress extracts and mysql database dumps.

Now, back to hacking on some new features 🙂

Broken, just at the worst possible moment

hakan Leave a comment

Just as I was doing the final preparations for my travel to Brussels, and maybe presenting the mosques map to some interested parties, I discovered that the backend is broken, and maybe was even broken for many days.

Shame on me, especially because at my day job, I consult people about resilient applications and the importance of monitoring and yadda yadda yadda.

Long story short, I need to spend the night in the hotel fixing stuff, and coming up with a way to show sorry pages if this should happen again…

Again, shame on me 😥

Houston, we are live… Or, rather, discovered

hakan Leave a comment

While thinking about what my minimum viable product would be and how much stuff I could add before having my little mapping project presentable to the general community, the nice guys at “OSM Blog” discovered my project.

I guess it might be something between my changes to the OSM wiki, creating a tiny page for the map over there, contributing taginfo metadata for my project, and a few other things, but in the end, they took the burden of decing when to do the annoucement from my shoulders.

Here is the link: Wochennotiz Nr. 299 / Karten

Thank you, guys 🙂

The POIs are on OSM, not google

hakan Leave a comment

Malenki found an error on my javascript where the scripts would be broken if google.com is disabled via noscript. Thanks to his good bug report with screen shots of his NoScript settings, I was able to fix the offending Javascript part.

Good thing is: Now, if one disables google.com via NoScript, the offending base layers are not offered for selection.

Things to learn from this: Better test your website with noscript too, even if 95% of its functionality really requires Javascript. You never know where some errors might come from 🙂

How I stopped worrying about “when can I release this?”

hakan 7 Comments

This project started up somewhen 2014, and after a long hiatus, I started earnestly hacking at it about one month ago. This automatically leads to the question when it would be good enough so I can show it to others and stop adoring the nice maps all by my lonesome.

Translated in managementy speak, when would I have achieved the “minimum viable product“?

A few days ago, thinking about using Trello for keeping my various trains of thought in some semblance of order, I read a blog entry written by Kevan Lee about managing time for the fifteen billion little side projects every one of us seems to have. The main point to take away from it?

“Never Set A Deadline”

“Over time, I’ve found that advice for side projects isn’t always the same as advice for regular ol’ daily work. In fact, a lot of the time it’s the opposite!

Side projects are a very different animal than traditional work”

At long last, someone who speaks from the core of my heart 🙂