DEV Community: Olivia Vahsen 🥑 🦄

Twitch Recap: Q&A on How Traffic is made!

Olivia Vahsen 🥑 🦄 — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 22:53:05 +0000

Hey everyone! Here I'll be recapping our last TomTomDevs Twitch stream of the year, which was this Tuesday! Check out the full recap here.

This episode was a little different, as instead of a purely coding tutorial, we decided to get a bit more open-ended and bring up some important questions about working with traffic. We didn't go it alone, however -- we brought in reinforcements, aka TomTom Product Marketing Manager, Jonathan Americo!

Featuring some of the traffic facts shown above, the world has seen massive changes in traffic patterns this year, which is why we answered some key questions.

Can we fool TomTom traffic with a bucket of phones?

In short, you actually can't! Phones are able to send nuanced indications of movement, so we can tell if a phone is moving only a few inches at a time, or is extremely close together. One might indicate a pedestrian, and the other a carful of people - neither of which are individual traffic points.

Will COVID-19's wild outlier traffic patterns influence historical traffic profiles of roads and road segments?

This is a good one! 2020's lack of traffic is definitely a part of history - and so, we are working on ways to ensure that it is differentiated in such a way, such as creating a short-term historical view.

For more questions and answers, watch our recap, and otherwise... Happy Holidays, and Happy Mapping!

Twitch Recap: Building a Small-Service Delivery App!

Olivia Vahsen 🥑 🦄 — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 15:29:39 +0000

Last week on Twitch, we did something a little different! As we've grown our channel, we wanted to experiment with doing two shorter streams instead of our regular long session. You can find the links to part 1 and part 2 here!

Originally, Jose and I presented a demo of this sample project at the recent virtual WeAreDevelopers conference in Vienna. We had a great time and wanted to break down these components for our Twitch audience.

In general, this project focused on the differences between creating multi-stop routing based on optimal speed vs. based on optimal distance, taking real-time traffic into consideration.

In part one, we focused specifically on the principles behind optimal "shortest path" finding, and explained the TSP (Traveling Salesman Problem).

TSP is familiar to many engineers for its lack of a universal solution - its one mathematical concept which can only be solved by a high-speed check of all possible path options.

When "paths" need to be mapped onto real-life roads, it introduces a whole new set of factors that TSP isn't responsible for - road closures, accidents, winding turns, and daily congestion.

In this project specifically, we used the nearest neighbor algorithm to help us marry a need for optimal delivery stops along our route, along with our optimal route calculations. Each route could be calculated with a priority of either the shortest speed or the shortest total distance. These are often not the same!

In part two, we used topics from one of our last devisodes to create radial geofences around each delivery waypoint on our route. This would allow us to later use the Notifications API to alert our recipient when their delivery is close to arriving.

By using a webhook connecting to MS Teams, we were able to view notifications of when our delivery car arrived in and out of the geofence, or dwelled there for a certain number of seconds.

Be sure to catch our Q&A on Traffic next week, Dec 15th at 12pm PST!

New Twitch Recap: EV Routing Part 2!

Olivia Vahsen 🥑 🦄 — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 23:46:54 +0000

In our longest stream ever, Jose and I showed off what goes into incorporating EV chargers along a route, and plotting your journey with charging stops! Find the full stream here, and a clip of the final routing process here.

Modeling an Audi E-Tron, we started by finding the car's specs, and starting with pre-set battery levels. At this point, we wanted to know things like the battery capacity, how much charge we want to start with, reach each stop with, and arrive with. In "regular" car terms, there's a difference between pulling into the gas station with 1/4 tank left and running on fumes! Choosing one method might lead to fewer road trip stops.

An important part of this episode included accounting for each of our potential chargers on the road, knowing how fast they can charge our model of car, our car's specs, and then pulling that information all together to see which available chargers are along our route.

Taken around the 18 minute mark, we explain this in laymen's terms a bit more as we chat.

This episode involved a lot of real-world debugging, and finally gave us a color-segmented route with markers to indicate each charging station.

From this, we could even add charging info to each stop, so we can know how long we would have to stay charging, and help us add up the grand total time of our road trip.

Twitch Recap: POI Details Part 2 + Search Autocomplete!

Olivia Vahsen 🥑 🦄 — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 21:45:34 +0000

This week, my fellow Dev Advocate, Jose, and I created a great example project on mapping businesses and displaying place information. Check out our recap here, on our Twitch channel-- we stream every other week, and answer your questions on all things coding and maps, live!

In one of our past Devisodes, we built an example with a clear UI to fetch and display POI information from our map. It looks like this!

As you can see from the sidebar, we show how to take information businesses provide to data sources, such as phone numbers, website links, photos and reviews, and display them in a readable format. While our example doesn't look fancy, it's made to show a start into making a UI after learning more basics about using the the Maps APIs.

In this episode, focused on adding Search Autocomplete. This means that when a user types in the search bar, two key things happen.

Results are narrowed to a radius within the map window (assumingly, the user's location).
The results shown are taken from the best-match business names and categories in the immediate area.

This allows us to add even more precise results to our project. See it in action here!

Lastly, we wrapped up by adding a colored perimeter to the search result we select as a user, providing some visual feedback on the map confirming our choice of POI. We ended the episode looking up Nando's in London, because why not.

This is a great example project for someone wanting to create a web-based map project which allows users to search for places around them -- to find the perfect salon, restaurant, shop, and so on!

Be sure to follow us at twitch.tv/tomtomdevs, and tune into our upcoming Devisodes for the rest of 2020!

Happy Mapping!

Spooky Times on Twitch with the Notifications API

Olivia Vahsen 🥑 🦄 — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 16:04:22 +0000

Another Twitch recap, this time for Halloween! Watch the full stream right here.

What did we do?

This episode was a mixed recap of a bunch of long, complex topics that we've worked with on other episodes -- geofencing and asset tracking. In the past, we've used webhooks to tell send us constant updates on our tracked object, and had them pop up as teams notifications.

This time, we introduced configuring notifications using Postman, which makes adding changes to the object, its name, and other properties so much easier.

Why is it Spooky?

Using the geofences set up from out multi-stop routing for delivery cars in past episodes, we set up a ghost object and talked about how to track its whereabouts.

This stream built a lot on our infamous Roswell geofencing episode, where we geofenced the city of Roswell and tracked a UFO which we set on a path. This time, we wanted to chat about how to be notified when our ghost (instead of the UFO) moved around to different areas. If you haven't already, you can watch that Geofencing episode here!

Booo! (And, happy mapping!)

WFH for Recent Grads Part 2: Swimming Upstream?

Olivia Vahsen 🥑 🦄 — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 01:52:36 +0000

Alright, so it seems my first piece on working from home for those in junior roles, or simply just new to the tech world, got a good amount of love (at least for me!) so I wanted to continue it with even more tips which have accumulated over the years from myself and others. No matter what kind of tech role you might have, if you feel like you’re swimming upstream in a new position from home, this article is for you!

Practice Positive Visualization

When you’re under pressure to prove yourself at a new role, it’s more than easy to be focused on what can go wrong…. what you’re doing wrong, what others are doing wrong, what is wrong with your setup, your understanding… you can work yourself up into a real lather! Instead of walking yourself in negative circles, take some time (maybe a couple of times a day, whenever you need it), and think purposefully on what you /want/, instead of what you want to avoid. Make a plan for success, and keep a list of your own ideal goals purely for how your day to day tasks pan out — they can be monthly, weekly, or even daily!

Just write it down

Speaking of the above, if you feel lost, allow yourself time to collect your thoughts, and just… write them all down. Start with what you know you need to do. Go into as much detail as you need to. Recall comments from meetings, over message, and email if they pop into your brain.

When you’re done — write them again. This time, you can be shorter. Summarize, and make a concrete to-do list that does its best to fit on one page, so you can physically /see/ all you have to do. Does it look crowded? Will you miss details? Write it again! This might seem super tedious, but if you’re a visual learner, I promise it helps to have your tasks clear for the naked eye to see. As you build up your work habits, it won’t take all those iterations to plan your day.

What if….

Okay, okay, everyone’s mind goes here. Sometimes, if you’re so preoccupied with a less than best case scenario, it helps to tackle thinking about it head on, once and for all. What if the day arrives — the day when your manager actually tells you that you’re not doing such a great job, and you need to be on a PIP, or personal improvement plan?

It’s not the end of the world. Moreover, this is usually private. Most of your coworkers probably won’t know that you’re on a PIP, so there’s no need to feel embarrassed. A PIP doesn’t mean you’re one foot outside the door of your job, it just means you need to be a little more strategic.

Ask, Ask, Ask

Take a breather, and come up with concrete questions about your performance history. Ask for examples of where you went wrong and what you should have done. You might have an instinct to put it all out of your mind, but this is the best time to learn better habits from your former self. It isn’t fun or easy to take criticism about yourself, especially past events you can’t change, but handling it well and seeking opportunities to prove you’ve improved will be noticed will help your working reputation and be noticed.

Ask some more

In my last post, I mentioned having trusted coworkers whose work you admire. If you have anyone in mind, now might be the time to ask them for more substantial feedback and advice. Take those concrete examples and ask them for their perspective.

If you find yourself without resources, it’s not your fault.

Every so often, you might find yourself in a role where you’re just not doing well at all, and you just don’t have the tools for success to make big changes. Maybe your team isn’t well suited to you, your role isn’t clear, or you have too much work and nowhere to ask for advice. If this is you, reach out to other people in your circle, both professionally and personally — don’t isolate yourself— if you can, and don’t be hard on yourself. You’ll eventually find somewhere to start fresh.

All that said: Take a Deep Breath!

Above all, remember that today’s challenges aren’t here to stay. Regardless of if you go back into the office soon or not, you’ll meet more and more people from your company from your day to day tasks, and you /will/ adjust to your work. Someone will reply to that email you sent, and you will find people to better connect with as days go on. Just like life, your work can (and will) change — and if change is what you need, you still have so much potential and many opportunities to shift your work over time. Hang in there!

EV Routing on Twitch Recap!

Olivia Vahsen 🥑 🦄 — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 18:38:11 +0000

On Tuesday, we were live on Twitch coding an EV Routing example! You can watch the recap here on our TomTomDevs Twitch. Hit follow so you can be notified when we go live!

For those who don't know me, I'm a Dev Advocate at TomTom, along with my colleague Jose! Every other Tuesday at 11am PST, we build all things Geospatial using TomTom Maps APIs, so you can learn more about coding with maps.

What we covered!

We started off talking about electric vehicles and the different aspects we need to route them -- battery level, car weight, the battery's max capacity, the route itself, and probably some resources on finding charging stations.

After selecting our luxury example EV, an Audi e-tron, we created a variable storing things like the car's current charge level.

We showed a way to calculate reachable range on click for any given point, using a polygon which adheres to actual roads at the extension of your current battery life.

Next, we showed a way to search and add waypoints and calculate a route, and added functionality to show charge points along the way by creating a search for charging stations that are no more than a few minutes out of the way for our existing road trip.

Check out our stream to learn more!

Catch us next time!

We'll be talking about working with the Notifications API on October 20th!

Recent Grads: Does WFH feel like living on an island?

Olivia Vahsen 🥑 🦄 — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 23:39:39 +0000

There’s no shortage of content on how to work from home, so if you’re here, you hopefully appealed to my message to recent grads — probably because you’ve read some of that content, but it seems tailored for seasoned professionals… and you may or may not really feel like a professional (yet). That’s okay!

New hires who are recent college grads fulfill a niche part of this messaging, but are perhaps in the biggest lurch. With everything to gain (but most likely, in your opinion, everything to lose) from having a clean slate and just entering your industry in a junior role, it can feel like your professional learning has been put on a major pause.

Without in-person mentoring, office culture, events, and everyday body language to guide you, it’s much harder to establish a good working rapport with your new colleagues and pick up on subtle cues you can use to advance your communication skills. While you might be worried about your hard skills, it’s more than likely your soft skills that are really troubling you — I know, no one wants to come back to the office acting “too young” after months of quarantine.

Rest assured, your head is in the right place, but don’t stress! I’ve been told that it comes as a slight surprise to many, but I too am actually a recent graduate! I made this same adjustment long before COVID, as my first full time experience was entirely remote. Read on for the tips I used to continue advancing my career onward and upward while finding success in my role, from the most popular questions I’ve received myself.

Be Aware of Social Pressure

Don’t worry, as one myself, I know that focusing in 50 directions is a Gen Z personality trait. And if I can hazard a guess, it’s probably that you may not need overtime, it’s your stress over feeling behind making it hard to focus, or feeling like you are socially obliged to work longer hours.

It may be the most common advice to date, but if you see your friends #grinding because they're "the newbie”, don’t compare your work experience to theirs. Glorifying overwork as a junior hire or intern can lead to toxic work habits over time.

If you can, log off several hours before you plan to wind down for the evening. Instead of feeling like you're restricting your time, practice thinking of it as compacting your time. Try giving yourself the mindset that you can, in fact, accomplish one day’s work in 8 hours.

What no one expects

Remember, no logically sound human expects you to conjure experience you don’t have. That said, I know that first roles can be dicy. If a colleague outside your immediate team challenges you for a small mistake, find a polite way to both apologize and remind them that you’re still learning. You don’t have to feel bad for not knowing something, but instead, make it clear that you want to improve. Which leads me to….

Keep Track of Issues

Begin and dedicate a physical, running list (outside your own head) of what trips you up in the week. This can be everything as small as how to plan a meeting to bigger concepts for your projects. Include interactions with peers that you found challenging.

Putting these issues into a list means they’re not floating around as worries, because it’s now a to-do list, and all you have to do is… do it. Write down your concerns as bullet points and keep on working, so you don’t have to stress about them.

See what issues recur from week to week, prioritize them, and bring the list with you to any regular onboarding or check in meetings with a trusted person. If you can, ask them how to handle interactions with colleagues who aren’t as aware of your circumstances, and remember — part of standing up for your own experience is part of creating a successful career.

Anyone who has been working long enough to give you advice knows this too — and if they’re rooting for you (which they probably are), they want you to learn this and be successful because of it.

Ask for Feedback, but form your own opinions first

It may be hard to swallow, but you really can trust your senses — so you may already know who you look up to at work. This is a good thing! Who do you like talking to the most, and why?

There’s a saying I like to use which says “Don’t compare yourself to someone you wouldn’t trade lives with” — this is true for work as well. When you find a few people whose work you appreciate, email them and say honestly that you’ve been wanting to improve navigating work from home as a new joiner, and that you’d like feedback on how you’re doing. Spend a few minutes getting to know them.

Some might decline, which is fine too. But if and when you find one or a few people who give you feedback and you enjoy talking to, stick with it. Taking advice from someone you have fun talking with will make you feel so much better about learning and growing with your new role. And now, you can feel like you have office friends.

You’re doing just fine!

Remember, you’re making the most of a less than ideal scenario. Don’t be too hard on yourself if solutions come slowly, or you have a few missteps. It can feel amplified without coworkers physically around to talk to, but it can be incredibly helpful to virtually talk things out on a regular basis — if not with someone from work, then with a friend in your field.

More often than not — you’re doing a great job with the experience you have. It can be easy to gloss over when you don’t have nods and smiles to see in person, but it’s the most important thing to keep in mind.

Culturally Sensitive Map Development with TomTom Geopolitical Views

Olivia Vahsen 🥑 🦄 — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 20:02:28 +0000

What you need to get started

While this article talks about cultural topics, it also shows you how to implement geopolitical view features into a TomTom web map. To do that, you’ll need to be able to use our SDK for Web and set up a basic vector map.

For this how-to, we'll be utilizing CDN as described in this vector map tutorial.

Aren't borders just borders?

In a slice of the online location services community, a conversation about map displays and disputed borders has been brewing for quite some time, opening the door for a greater thought about what it means to collect, develop and publish the world’s mapping information.

At TomTom, it stands to reason that developers should be able to decide for themselves which view they use during development when taking disputed areas into account, which isn’t as common of a feature as you might think. Taking this problem into consideration, I’ll be illustrating the importance of culturally-sensitive mapping, and how you can do it with TomTom – wherever you are.

To a computer system, borders are just political lines that represent the passage into different legislative areas, and essentially exist to inform the user that there are risks (small or large) involved when crossing an international boundary during their travels. However, to many cultures the world over, their lives have been majorly impacted by these “political lines”. The mapping service they pull up on their phone represents their country and means more than the digital equivalent of a road sign. Developers in these areas stand to lose credibility for any location-using application they build when the service they design for local users doesn’t measure up to the cultural boundaries known to the main audience of their product.

Google Mapping & Palestine

Earlier this year, the Washington Post compiled a very intriguing piece that shed light on how views have been shown to vary on Google Maps based on the location from which the user is reading the map. Notably mentioned toward the end of the piece is that Google reportedly “erased” Palestinian areas; in reality, search results still pointed toward Palestine, but it was seemingly not labeled to the extent of Israel and other neighboring nations for some viewers.

As of March 27th, 2020, the Google Maps result for a search of “Palestine” shows as such below in the top image. Below that, you’ll the same map with an alternate zoom level.

When zooming out by one factor, familiar Palestinian indications are viewable, still not to the bolded extend of greater Israel, though. If you look at the two maps adjacent to each other, you can see that there are marked differences in how Areas such as the Gaza Strip, The West Bank, and major Israeli cities are affected by zoom level. Now, let’s compare to TomTom views.

The TomTom View

Using the TomTom dual-view geopolitical example, you can see the following side by side comparison, which includes a view locally sensitive to Israeli mappers on the left, as well as a Unified View recognizing Palestine in an equally-weighted font design on the right.

Developing with Culturally Sensitive Maps

You can embed this dual-view suite that includes a selection of different geopolitical examples directly into your website, allowing you to toggle between Unified and local comparisons for not only Israel, but India, Morocco, Pakistan, Argentina, Russia, Turkey, and Arabic areas as well.

You can do this by toggling the code selection on the top right menu above the SDK example found here.

Toggling over to the code section gives you the ability to paste the code in full, either via highlighting the selections you want to use, or by using the copy to clipboard selection at the bottom.

Even easier is the option to play around with the different features in Codepen, shown at the very right of the menu bar as a selection, with the view below. Codepen does a great job of splitting HTML, CSS and JS in a beginner-friendly view, so that you can interact with components independent of each other visually and produce results that are easy for you to track.

Here, we can perform a few simple operations within a sandbox just to get a feel for how these code components work, but since this code doesn’t live within a greater project, like it might when I’m able to edit on my own machine, we’re a bit limited by what CodePen can perform.

Building the View on Your Own

On a technical scale, using a geopolitical view is essentially a singular purpose feature, changing nothing but the user’s view of a specific region. There is not a lot of outside functionality except for the specific use cases we outlined, but this also makes it very simple to implement.

The best way to begin this part is by following the instructions to get started using the latest version of the SDK for Web, V5, and accessing via CDN. You can do this via the “Display a Vector Map” tutorial. When you’re done, you can resume with the rest of this section.

We are going to borrow a few lines of code from the “Code” tab view shown both on the Geopolitical example on our website and on Codepen. If you’ve explored that, the following should look familiar:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>My map</title>
        <link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='https://api.tomtom.com/maps-sdk-for-web/cdn/5.x/5.52.0/maps/maps.css'/>
        <script src='https://api.tomtom.com/maps-sdk-for-web/cdn/5.x/5.52.0/maps/maps-web.min.js'></script>
        <!-- <script type='text/javascript' src='../map/geopolitical-views.js'></script> -->
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id='map' style='height:100vh;width:100vw'></div>
        <script>
        // tomtom.setProductInfo('<your-product-name>', '<your-product-version>');

      var locationData = [
         {
            id: 'IN',
             center: [78, 24],
             zoom: 3
         },
         {
             id: 'IL',
             center: [34.8, 31],
             zoom: 7
         },
         {
             id: 'MA',
             center: [-6.356618, 31.880916],
             zoom: 3
         },
         {
             id: 'PA',
             center: [69.306735, 29.759973],
             zoom: 3
         },
         {
            id: 'AR',
             center: [-68.361007, -42.426041],
             zoom: 2
         },
         {
           id: 'Arabic',
             center: [51.744665, 25.790791],
             zoom: 5
         },
         {
            id: 'RU',
             center: [33.988533, 45.488992],
             zoom: 7
         },
         {
           id: 'TR',
             center: [33.254136, 35.115268],
             zoom: 7
         }
     ];

            tt.map( {
                key: 'YOUR-KEY',
                    container: 'map',
                    source: 'vector',
                    basePath: '/sdk',
                    language: 'en-US',
                    style: 'tomtom://vector/1/basic-main',
                    zoom: 8,
                    center: locationData[1].center,
                    geopoliticalView: locationData[1].id
        });
        // var mymap = tt.map('mapid').setView([51.505, -0.09], 13);
        // var marker = tt.marker([51.5, -0.09]).addTo(mymap);


        </script>


    </body>
</html>

And that’s actually all you need. I’ve highlighted a couple of lines, because these are the most important in determining which political view you interact with, and where your map centers when you launch it.

Setting the center and locationData index at [1] will use the view ‘IL’, aka Israel. This will give us the following:

This is the Israeli-specific view which shows Israel’s and Gaza’s names at different weights and styles of font, and at the current zoom does not indicate the West Bank. Bordering is easily seen between greater Israel and this area, indicated by the blue.

By changing geopoliticalView: locationData[1].id to geopoliticalView: locationData[2].id, we can implement a different geopolitical view (that of Morrocco); by leaving the center in Israel, we can now see the Unified map view. You will see the similar font weights appear for Palestine as in the images earlier in the article:

This shows us the difference between each unified view at a time and allows you greater freedom to change them around or incorporate as needed.

What does this all mean?

Creating an environment where users are able to experience locally-minded map views is well within your grasp as a developer. The geopolitical views example makes it easy to import code showing different border situations for main disputed territories across the world.

Establishing and implementing “Unified” maps is often a double-edged sword. Often, Unified maps are established with the well-intention of growing general knowledge of national boundary lines for travelers, students, and the rest of the public who might view maps of a given area for any reason. However, cultural-political situations change rapidly and involve issues deeper than font-size designations, dashed lines, and name placement.

Cultural tensions in places such as Israel and India already existed before many of the Western countries we know today; these conflicts aren’t new – and while they’ve evolved over time, for many of the people for whom they still have a real and present impact on, they’re not best represented by a temporary border line, a blank space, or a gap in a map.

Giving developers – digital mapmakers—the option to preserve the geopolitical views of the locality they look to map seeks to establish and preserve a new relationship between local cultures and the age of online mapping. This is an area that has recently been fraught with infighting and misunderstandings of the real purpose of making maps – to connect people to the places they wish to learn about.

If developers can have access to easy ways to integrate more than one view of one boundary, digital mapping can prove to have an open door for to a greater theme of what it means to develop ethically- and with a mind toward greater social empathy for communities around the world.

At the end of the day, developing with maps perhaps shouldn’t be about asking cultures to conform to a set of parameters to make mapping easier, but rather using the tools we have to best represent an area for the purposes of a project that serve and respect its community.