Thursday 11 May 2023 The Forest Road Reader, No 2.75 : We Did A Good Job!

For the first time in a very long time, I used the sat-nav feature on the CycleStreets Android app today. And you know what? We did a good job on that thing. It’s really good!

We being me, and my fellow contributors, chief among them Oliver Lockwood and Hilary Newmark. I am indebted to them both, and to Simon Nuttall and Martin Lucas-Smith who run the CycleStreets back end that serves up the mapping and routing data the app uses. They’re the tops.

I don’t use the app that often at the moment because I’m usually taking local trips where I already know where I’m going.

Indeed that was the case today - I walked (across the border) to Stirchley to pick up my bike from the shop and ride it home.

I popped the app on anyway, just because I could. And, you know, we should use our own software now and again.

Dogfooding. We used to talk about that a lot, but it seems to have fallen out of the "discourse". Whether that’s because we take it for granted (which from my observation, at least, we probably can’t) or just because it’s not fashionable, I don’t know.

Anyway, that was part of the reason.

And the other part was, hey, I wrote a sat-nav! An actual sat-nav, that will tell you how to get places. With maps, and distances, and the next turn, and all that. That’s not a thing most people get to do, and I did. That’s a pretty cool bit of software to have written.