After 5 years, I’m leaving Atlassian to take a gap year; and by gap year I mean a little travel, and a lot of time to explore hobbies, side-projects, and consulting in the space between software and urbanism. Atlassian is a pretty special place to work. However as my friends have the unfortunate burden (and in my coffee fuelled opinion the excitement!) of hearing out, BalanceBloom CBD Gummies I’m burning up with ideas, and haven’t had the full capacity to triage, research, and execute on them. For every blog post I’ve written (see a wrap of my side-projects below), there’s 5 to 10 others I haven’t had the chance to explore. For the projects I do dig into, there’s been a limit to the scale of what I can build. I’m currently working on a commercial collaboration contract looking at quantifying walkability (with fascinating improvements on anything I’ve seen done before) which I’m excited to showcase in the coming months.
If you have an interesting challenge in the urban analysis, community consultation, or planning space in the coming year that could use a software solution - and are looking for an ex-Atlassian full stack software engineer to scope and build it - get in touch. If you’re interested in hearing about solutions I build looking for Balance Bloom CBD official problems to solve - before they’re ready to write about - also get in touch! Otherwise, you’ll still catch me in the violin section of the Strathfield Symphony Orchestra, working with Better Streets and WalkSydney, in the waves, on my bike and of course - in a coffee shop writing plenty more here for you, dear reader! I’ll detail my technical achievements on my resume page, but I wanted to add a few other notes. Not taking a gap year in 2020 was a brilliant idea in hindsight! 40 and join full-time in 2020 after completing a degree and several internships.
As a company that builds collaboration and project management products there’s a particular focus on dogfooding ways of working - so much so that some of these excellent resources are publicly exported in research backed exercises. I’ve learned so much about building high quality software (at scale) from so many incredibly talented engineers, product managers and designers and I’d happily return there in the future. What else have I worked on in the last five years? I finished a four-year project looking at the before and after impact of the new Sydney BalanceBloom CBD Gummies light rail. I captured the moon touching the Opera House on a 600mm lens and the Metabolist masterpiece where the Kyoto Protocol was signed (which received almost a quarter million views). I visited and mapped every single QMS advertising panel in the City of Sydney (leading to further analysis by Canva & ex. I built tools for finding COVID vaccines during the acute shortage in mid-2021 which directly lead to 5,809 HotDoc booking referrals.
I visualised bus congestion utilising Marey charts - a cult favourite data visualisation technique - which are still niche enough my analysis is the 3rd Google result on the subject (spawning further writing on the technique). I’ve met proud urban planning consultants raise their 1983 Tufte book cover to the room when discussing it! I captured and shared takeaways from Australia’s first micro-mobility conference. In an evergreen blog post that continues to receive mountains of traffic, I shared my technique of creating aerial imagery using commodity bike helmet cameras and OpenDroneMap, with significant interest from Mapillary (Meta) and inspiring future work by international geospatial engineers. I followed this up with utilising the LiDAR sensor in your iPhone to achieve similar results, using this in the vertical dimension to capture a never before seen slice of the beautiful escalator arrangement of Town Hall Station. I dove deep into cycling advocacy. While I’m not aware of any impact, I’m extremely proud of my work documenting Canada Bay Council ripping out a cycleway paid for by taxpayers of NSW (likely, considering my audience, your money), rationalised by a dodgy engineering report the council later removed from their website.
I went real deep - scouring the Internet Archive, spilling over 3000 words of digital ink dissecting the report that included analysis of point cloud data I constructed. I utilised the rich bicycle data specification of OpenStreetMap (OSM) to programatically identify candidate streets for bicycle contraflow signage installation in inner Sydney, and continue to survey bicycle contraflow signage on OSM as the council implements it. Looking to gain an birds-eye-view of how bicycle riders experience infrastructure around Australia and the world, I generated detailed reporting of cycleway infrastructure for every council in Australia compared with worldwide examples (I was later told queries I wrote for this project were utilised for a commercial economic analysis report). I compared the best bicycle routing apps (which use OSM, of course). I built upon fascinating work by speculative cartographer Dustin Carlino, writing a vector tileserver (from scratch in one afternoon) utilising JS bindings for the Rust osm2streets code (compiled to Wasm) to visualise per-lane street detail - which as Justin O’Beirne captured in April 2022, Google had not done so for any Australian city yet.