Minutes from the last minutes of 2016
It feels wrong to leave my blog hanging on such a brief note about new employment, especially now that I no longer have to keep nearly as many secrets about what I do in front of the computer screen. A blog post authored on December 31st is all but guaranteed to be a year in review. But I’ve procrastinated on updating this blog for well over a year, so you’ll get more than you bargained for.
As my last post suggests, I’ve been preoccupied with maps all this time. Specifically, I’ve been developing an iOS Cocoa Touch library for utterly customizable maps with an incredibly creative team. It wasn’t my intention to delve into iOS development after leaving the Cupertino orchard. After all, I had only started using a smartphone a few months prior. It was only a matter of time before I gave into temptation and ported the library to macOS. Now I have an excuse to write AppleScript!
To me, the most important feature of these map libraries is that they’re based on OpenStreetMap data. Libraries like Mapbox’s are a conduit for the OSM community’s unparalleled, mostly labor-of-love mapping to find their way into the lives of ordinary folks who don’t obsess over maps. I have a lot more to say about why OSM matters, but it would take this post far into manifesto territory, so that’ll have to wait until next year.
Last year, I got an opportunity to share ideas for nurturing the OSM community at, of all places, the United Nations headquarters in New York. It was my first time I’d ever spoken at a conference – I guess it showed. The conference scene also took me to Mexico City and San Diego, where I introduced a small sliver of the Wikimedia community to OSM and its community. The Wikimedia and OSM projects are drawing much closer together, and we’ll finally start to see some of the concrete benefits of that relationship in the new year.
AVIM, my Vietnamese input method extension for Firefox, gained some long-needed features this year, like support for multisyllabic loan words. But the future of that beautiful extension is in doubt, because Mozilla is dead-set on sunsetting the only browser extension platform that’s more than a toy. It’s a pity; the end of AVIM in Firefox will chip away at Vietnamese speakers’ ability to use their native language as a first-class citizen on the Web.
So it’s with mixed feelings that I careen into 2017, but only because 2015–16 was so swell. I’m sure you’re already looking forward to my next last-minute update in approximately one year.
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1/ 1/2018 @ 11:55 AM
Minh’s Notes
Minutes from the last minutes of 2017
2016 paved the way for a 2017 that took me in a couple new directions but mostly fell along the same themes.
9/16/2018 @ 4:27 PM
Minh’s Notes
I spy a spy
The author of several Firefox add-ons has turned some of them into spyware designed to steal passwords from unsuspecting users.