DEV Community: Petya

☀️🗺️FOSS4G 2023: Balkan experiences, reflections & advocating for women in the geospatial world 🚀

Petya — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 09:37:32 +0000

Hello tech enthusiasts,

It has been nearly a month since I attended FOSS4G in Kosovo! But as I live to the value better late than never, thought it is not too late to share some of my reflections.

This is my second time attending FOSS4G! Being new to the geospatial field my first attendance last year was quite overwhelming- see my blog! This time I knew what to expect, I knew more people and was able to enjoy the sessions, conversations and connections a lot more!

So… here are some of my highlights! Hard to capture all of them and especially all the people that have made this experience so incredible! Thanks to EVERYONE I have interacted during the conference who have made this experience so great! Let's start with a smiley photo with my HOTOSM colleagues Nirab, Synne, Kshitij, Yogesh and Can :)

Workshops and sessions: HOTOSM and FOSS4G

This year, together with my colleagues from HOT (you can see in the photo above) we organised a side event to talk about what we are working on and how people can get involved! I was so happy to see some familiar faces attending the workshop, but even more excited to connect with participants who were new to our work and were interested in learning! Feeling the enthusiast, passion and eagerness to collaborate and contribute is my key takeaway from that sessions.

We did two breakout sessions focussing on testing the Field Mapping Tasking Manager (FMTM)- see photo below- and walking through the importance of local models in our AI assisted mapping project (fAIr). Thanks to everyone who joined, shared their feedback and even raised already Github issues/PRs with their input! If you missed the side event, want to learn more and contribute, here is our Github repo: https://github.com/hotosm

Hearing my colleague Can Unen's talk - Community Activation for the Kahramanmaraş Earthquake Response via OpenStreetMap and also the keynote by Said Turksever Türkiye and Syria Earthquakes Mapping Response, really brings to life why we are all here- importance of OpenStreetMap and open geospatial technology - at least to me! Technology as the enabler in response to disasters.

There were many other sessions/interactions that I really enjoyed and won't be able to capture here. I loved being able to chat more to our top-up travel grantees (Kaue, Feye and Shakti) and meeting in person one of our long standing volunteers- Sam Woodcock (his work and efforts in development of FMTM have been instrumental). Another highlight was a participant coming to me and Synne after our general talk, telling us that the sessions we led were the best/ highlights from his attendance at the conference. That really meant a lot. So remember folks - a small thank you or sharing feedback with your colleagues and friends can mean a lot (you might not even realise it!).
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The Balkan Experience: Kosovo

Being from the Balkans myself (proud Bulgarian living in the UK) I was very excited that the conference will take place in Kosovo- a country I have never visited before and always wanted to. The hospitality and how welcoming everyone was really made me feel like home. The conference was so well organised - from the venue with lots of outdoor space, to the wonderful communication with attendees, the amazing socials and the fabulous social media updates- ensuring people who can't join can still feel part of the experience! Thanks again to all the wonderful people in the local organising committee and all the volunteers!

I fell in love with Prizren - the food, the weather, the views from the fortress, the evening catch up with people and the Balkan music. One of my highlights was indeed listening to Gypsy Groove- how amazing were they? I feel touched that so many people from around the world were able to experience the Balkan rhythms that I feel very connected to!

Women in Tech

In this blog I also wanted to make sure I highlight the women that have made this conference (at least for me!) so inspiring! Really reflecting on making this a must in every blog or story I share.

Miriam Gonzalez: feel like she doesn’t need an introduction: what an inspiring leader with a very humble and down to earth approach! We all enjoyed her keynote- take a look at her reflections on Twitter.
Synne Olsen- my close colleague and friend- who is a true inspiration every single day I interact with her! The passion, curiosity and determination together with her human centred approach to any challenge/problem is to be admired!

Feye Andal- a long standing members of the OpenStreetMap community! Her blog says it all- a leader who is breaking barriers for women in the tech world.

Geochicas- all the women in the geochicas social! To also making new friends - winning the Bingo with Mariana Balla.

Thank you to all the inspiring women! I was going to say I feel grateful for being able to connect with all of you, but then also remember this TED talk, which talked about ....." understand and remember that being grateful and being treated fairly are not mutually exclusive. I can be grateful but still know exactly what I deserve. And that's the way to do it." So I will use a different word. I feel really inspired by you and appreciate all that YOU do for this community and all the hard work that you put into it! Keep being amazing in what you do and continue thriving and supporting each other!

Keep in touch my friends!! Until next time- maybe see you in Brazil next year?

✨HOTOSM open source tech collective: how to improve your contributor journey ✨

Petya — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 10:06:56 +0000

Hi everyone, 👋

I am relatively new to this space, but have been following the dev.to blogs for some time and have really enjoyed reading the intro for beginners on contributing to open source. I, like many others, feel passionate about the collective power of open source collaboration, especially in areas where we are not speaking simply about code-contributions. I am part of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM) - you can see some of my posts about the collective hot_tech blogs.

In this blog I want to get your feedback on one question: how might we collectively improve the open source contributor journey for newcomers?

Why contribute to Open Source? What are the different ways to contribute? 💭 🚀

The why: there are so many reasons that have been captured in multiple blogs on this platform. But why not briefly flag them again and those more specific to the OpenStreetMap community: you meet new people and build your network, you connect with staff and community members, you get new experience, you learn new skills in developing open geospatial humanitarian tech and build your portfolio/ CV, and many more.

The What: I want to start with the non-code contributions. You can be an open source contributor by being an advocate at events about open geospatial tools, by testing and improving the user experience, by improving documentation and helping translate the different open source tools. All of the above does not require you to be a developer. And of course you can report bugs, raise issues and help with PRs. The collective power is having people with different knowledge and experience contributing to the same project. As an example, HOT is taking part in Outreachy internship round (May- August) and the project we submitted for contribution was focusing on documentation (non-code contributions). You can see on Github the amount of enthusiasm and contributions from potential applicants. I was personally very inspired by all applicants! :)

How to contribute to HOTOSM open source project? 💻

Since joining HOTOSM I have had quite a few 1:1 chats people interested to contribute to open source and the first questions I get asked is HOW and WHERE do I start? My approach has been to first understand what their skills and interests and then direct people to the correct place. I have guided people through these steps:

Start by registering to Github (if you don't yet have an account):
Look at the pinned repositories on Github
Read through the contributor guidelines: do they help you understand how to contribute?
Look for "good-first" issues

I have now created a Github Overview Page with these guidelines and would love to get feedback on it.

We also run monthly HOT Open Tech and Innovation Working Group sessions- an open space to connect, contribute, collaborate, innovate and share ideas for geospatial tech for humanitarian purposes! Register here.

You feedback! 🤝

I'd love to hear from you on what we can do better to improve your contributor journey. What kind of additional guides will be helpful? If you have never heard of HOTOSM and first time landing on our Github Overview Page, then that will be a great test to see whether the guidance we have provided is useful.

Any ideas are welcome! I would love to hear from more women and people based in HOT's priority countries who have an interest in contributing.

HOT Tasking Manager - Service Worker

Petya — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 10:49:18 +0000

Hello Dev community,

This is the first blog posting on this platform and I wanted to share a bit about a problem we have faced with one of our key tools- HOT Tasking Manager- and how we addressed it! The HOT Tasking Manager (Github repo) is being maintained as a collective effort between the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and Kathmandu Living Labs team.

We would love to hear from the dev community and see if you have faced similar issues with the service worker and how you have resolved it.

The Tasking Manager’s resource is covered by the service worker’s scope, acting as a network proxy. You'll discover that you can browse content while not connected to the internet; test browsing the "learn" page without an internet connection to check if the content is still accessible. The service provider makes this feasible. By enabling offline access and enhancing page performance with a number of caching techniques, they seek to increase reliability.

The problem

The service worker currently installed on your browser has to be replaced whenever a new Tasking Manager deployment is done. We experienced problems with the latest service worker being unable to control the app for eerie, mysterious reasons. In layperson's terms, the user is not being able to access the new TM version, resulting in unexpected user behaviours.

When the browser notices a difference between the service worker currently in charge of the client and the new (from your server) version of the same file, it initiates the installation of the new service worker. The detecting procedure is carried out throughout a page visit. The most recent deployment's detection, download, and installation occur as the user browses the cached copy or the old service worker files. In other words, the most recent deployment will never be effectively downloaded and cached if the user does not spend enough time on the cached version of the app. Before returning, all tabs and windows must be closed or navigated away using the current service worker. The following service worker won't assume charge until after that.

It will take some time until the most recent deployment is cached or the new service worker is correctly installed if the app's size is too large for the network.

Why show the ‘Update now’ prompt?

Refreshing the app to let the new service worker take over the client without giving the user a clear indication may be surprising and may not be what we want users to experience. To be on the safe side, we provide a prompt to the user to apply the update by showing the UI pop over notification, which is visible on the Tasking Manager's bottom left corner and notifies about the new version of the service worker that is pending and ready to be activated.

The newly created service worker, awaiting activation, assumes control of the client if users click the "Update now" button. This indicates that the app is updated and supplied to the user. The new service worker will take over on the app's subsequent use if the user clicks the "Remind me later" button or simply dismisses this pop up. The pop up is a trade-off between providing the user with the actual version of the program and providing updates on their next visit. The compromise in this situation is that people continue to load the outdated cached TM. Without this pop up, we would fail to provide an opportunity to reload a page on a service worker update, which may bring about unexpected behaviours.

Why are TM users suggested performing a hard refresh so frequently?

A hard refresh clears the browser's cache for a specific page, forcing it to load the most recent version of a page.

Give me my latest version of TM already!

We could have had an evergreen Tasking Manager by removing the service worker and accessing all the assets on it directly from the network, but this would have resulted in a poor user experience because the network would have to fetch all the time-consuming resources. For the Tasking Manager, this is a necessary evil, offers incredible utility, and is advocated for progressive web applications.

If you are unable to log in or are experiencing additional issues, try hard-refreshing the browser. If it doesn't work, delete all site data from your browser.

We would love to hear your views!
Petya, HOT_tech and KLL team :)