Geocaching is delightful because of the people who play it — adventure-seekers, makers, parents, astronauts and (sometimes) celebrities. Read their stories.
Have you ever wondered what your town would look like shrunk to dollhouse scale? Cache owner, chraxli, not only had the vision, but he executed the idea in his own front yard! Paying homage to their local station in Wartou, whose sign is featured in the vignette, this Geocache of the Week in Eastern Switzerland is anything but Traditional.
Cache In Trash Out® (CITO) is a bi-annual, week-long event in the spring and fall that focuses on environmental clean-up. Typically geocachers get together and clean up their neighborhoods or restore habitats. The Slovenian Geocaching Club hopped on a different approach this year — to carry frogs to safety.
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Chris Ronan: Hello everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast from Geocaching HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan, my username is Rock Chalk. I am one of the people that works here at HQ and I am your guide for the podcast. On this episode we are talking about EarthCaches. You might remember after the… Well, at the end of the last episode I begged and pleaded for you to write in with some suggestions for future episodes, and people came up with a number of really great topics. And we will be trying to work our way through those when we can. One of the suggestions came from the user jrandjuju, and I hope I pronounced that correctly. jrandjuju asked if we could speak about EarthCaches. Specifically asked if we could interview an EarthCache reviewer and talk about what they require and maybe what ideas are for putting an EarthCache together.
CR: So what I did is I got with one of my colleagues here at HQ, her name is Cathy Hornback. Besides being an HQ staffer, she is a reviewer here in Washington State, in the US. She does not review EarthCaches, but she is essentially the liaison between HQ and the Geological Society of America, and so she’s extremely involved in EarthCaches. And she interacts with a lot of EarthCache reviewers around the world. So she’s very aware of what they’re looking at when they review EarthCache submissions, what they look for, what the requirements are, and what makes a good EarthCache. So I thought Cathy would be a great person to talk to and hopefully get at some of the information that jrandjuju was hoping to hear about. So, here is me talking with Cathy Hornback.
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CR: Well, you’re a popular podcast guest, Cathy. You were on the PodCacher recently with Sonny and Sandy. In that case talking about just reviewing in general, right?
Cathy Hornback: They wanted to know a lot about permission and how to get it, and especially if you’re a little afraid of that. And that actually ties into EarthCaching because all EarthCaches must be placed with permission, unless you can show that there’s no one that owns the land, no one that manages it or anything.
CR: So if you wanna hear more of Cathy after you listen to this, you can go listen to the PodCacher and listen about permissions. And the reason that they ask you about that, just talk a little bit first about before what we get into what you at HQ and what you do at GSA, you’re also a reviewer in the State of Washington for many years, correct? You just had your anniversary.
CH: Yeah, it’s nine years. [chuckle]
CR: Nine years.
CH: Nine, can’t believe it. It’s gone so fast.
CR: And so you’re a great person to ask about stuff about permissions, but then also today what we’re talking about with EarthCaches. Let’s start with how your role at HQ works into working with EarthCaches.
CH: Okay. Well, a lot of the stuff I do for the regular reviewers I do for the EarthCache reviewers. So I support them as a group. I help train them. I answer their questions. I work on their training material. I’m a liaison between them and the GSA, which is the Geological Society of America. I do onboarding and continual training of them in my every day work.
CR: So before we get into the weeds, let’s just start with for… And I think for most people that listen to this, they’re going to know what an EarthCache is, but for somebody that might not, what is the explanation? What is an EarthCache for somebody that might not know?
CH: Okay. An EarthCache site is a specific geological location that people can visit to learn about a unique geoscience feature or aspect of our earth. And so when people visit these EarthCaches, they can see how our planet has been shaped by geological processes, how we manage resources, and how scientists gather evidence.
CR: So for people that might just know about physical caches, maybe they know about virtuals and then they run into EarthCaches, it seems like, “Where did that come from?” And some, what is the history behind HQ and how the Geological Society of America, how they got together and came up with this cache type of EarthCaches?
CH: Oh, sure. Back in 2003 at a GSA conference, some of the GSA members suggested that the Geological Society become involved in geocaching. And so they organized a meeting with geocaching here and some land managers like the US National Park Service. Because it’s very important that if we’re gonna do this that we are respectful of the land and land management policies. Together, we all came up with some guidelines and standards and goals for this. That’s pretty much how it happened. The first EarthCache is in Australia, it’s still active. It’s in New South Wales on the beach, it has many, many different… It’s actually a multi-EarthCache ’cause it takes you to many different features all around in that area that are fascinating and they’re all slightly different. It’s a really, like geology in a bag. [chuckle] And now…
CR: So for… Oh, sorry.
CH: Oh, sorry. So that cache was published in 2004. And then within the first year there were more than 500 of them. And now there’s over 28,500 active EarthCaches right now.
CR: Wow. So from the GSA’s perspective, this is educational outreach for them, right?
CH: Exactly. I think that’s one thing that Geocachers should know about EarthCaching, is that they’re not quick smileys. The branch of the Geological Society that supports it is the educational section. And they are very focused on learning. So they don’t want a quick smiley. They want you to see the thing, understand what it is, how it came to be that way, and do something interactive at the location to help you remember it.
CR: When you look at EarthCaches today, some of those 28,000 or so that are out there, I think people might notice that some of the earlier ones, not all of them but some of them, you might just come to a road sign and it’ll say, “Look for this word on a sign,” or whatever, whereas things that are published closer to today are a little more involved. And it sounds like there was maybe a change of thinking or maybe things got a little bit more stringent right around 2013 or 14. Something like there.
CH: Yes, something like that. The guidelines for EarthCaching evolve over time just the same way the Geocaching guidelines have. And there’s stuff that they couldn’t anticipate at the beginning. And when you just go to a sign and copy a word off of it, you probably forget about that tomorrow. So they’ve tightened them up in order to make them more of a lesson, because it’s all about education, to help you remember it. So you have to do an interactive task there that you have to be looking at the spot and thinking. And that’s how you learn and remember those things.
CR: So how do HQ and the GSA work together, and how do you get involved in that?
CH: Well, I liaise between them and HQ. I do not so much on the business end but almost everything else. Just the day to day workings. And because we rely so much on volunteers to help support this for the community. It naturally works with me doing it. And I love geology, so it’s fascinating to me. So I really enjoy supporting it.
CR: So you pretty regularly are emailing back and forth with folks at the GSA. And I believe they had a big meeting here in Seattle just last year, right?
CH: Yes they did.
CR: So you had a chance to run into some of them there.
CH: Yeah, every year the Geological Society has an annual meeting that I was surprised when I finally went to it this time that it was so huge. And it gives geologists a chance to make presentations and a lot of the things that they need to do for their continuing education. And it’s an amazingly huge conference. And also very fascinating if you like geology. It was so cool. [chuckle]
CR: So you have great perspective as both somebody who has created a number of EarthCaches, and then you work with the GSA quite a bit. You are in touch with volunteer reviewers and you’re out there finding EarthCaches too. [chuckle]
CH: That’s right.
CR: So when you take all of that into account, I think you have great perspective from kind of all different sides. And I’m wondering for somebody that’s looking at creating one, just to me personally, it can seem like a very overwhelming thing to think about doing. And you’ve tried to help me at times. [chuckle] And I still kind of am like, “Oh my gosh, there’s just so much.” ‘Cause I… Of course you want it to be good. And you want it to be something that somebody learns from. What kind of tips do you give to a person when they’re thinking about doing this? When they’re thinking about creating an EarthCache, what should they know going into the process?
CH: Okay. So for one thing, you wanna try and find something that’s unique, and unique and specific to that location. So you don’t want to do just granite that you find somewhere. Especially if it isn’t even been mined from there, quarried from there. That I don’t want to know just about granite. I wanna know about that piece of granite right there, and where it came from, and why is that color? And why do the crystals have that size? And all of that specific to that one. It has to be unique. It also has to be something you can see. There’s a lot of places that would have a really good lesson if you could see it through the trees. But you can’t because you can’t see the land, how the land lays with the trees on it. So it has to be visible. And you always have to have permission. And make sure you think of your logging tasks when your on the scene. Look at the guidelines. Being prepared is the best way to succeed. So I have one I’m planning to do and I am doing all my homework ahead of time. I am trying to think of all the logging tasks that I can do and I’m preparing that ahead of time so that when I get there, I’ll know, I will check for things that have everything covered because it’s a long way from where I live and not easy to get back to. So I’m going to be very careful and my planning ahead is really gonna help me.
CR: When you look at an EarthCache, What makes a good one? I imagine you look at it as both a person that works with the GSA but also just as a geocacher. When you see an EarthCache and it’s great, what kind of characteristics does it have?
CH: Well, I like seeing something unique. I love a really good lesson that really explains to me what happened, especially when it’s not obvious. I remember when I was in Utah, I did one that was about mesas that were quite high above the land that I was walking on, and they were black on top. And so you immediately think that, “Oh, everything else is weathered away around them.” And it turns out that that used to be the ground and the black stuff on top is lava. And it held the ground there while everything else weathered away when it used to be the bottom of a valley, because the lava went through the valley. And I would never have guessed that. It was fascinating. So that kind of stuff is cool if it teaches me stuff I don’t know or I wouldn’t have guessed, and there’s a lot of them. Our world is an amazing place.
CR: When you see EarthCache listings, what are some of the common mistakes that you see, stuff that you would tell people, “Try to avoid this kind of thing.”
CH: Yeah. That’s a good question to ask ’cause I like people to be successful. For one thing, people make mistakes about trying to focus on other sciences, where we really have to be earth science, much heavily on geology. Don’t try to think of them as a substitute for a virtual. This has to be a geology lesson. You can’t just show something you think is neat and say there’s a rock there. You wanna avoid really generic information because we wanna talk about this place and what is unique about that there. So just how some things were formed that you just get off the internet isn’t really necessarily what you want. You wanna be something uniquely about that spot. Don’t copy Wikipedia. [chuckle] You’ll get caught. You have to… You can copy limited amounts of text if you attribute it, but it really needs to be done in your own words. You need to… And you should be able to do this. If you have learned enough about this feature to make an EarthCache about it, you should be able to talk about it and explain it with your own words, and make sure that you can see what it is.
CR: And be prepared for what can be a more involved review process. It’s not nearly as simple as a “basic geocache.” [chuckle]
CH: Yes. Yeah, it is… They’re a lot more work to put together, they’re a lot more work to review, but in the end, you get a really amazing thing because EarthCaches have more favorite points than all of the other cache types put together. And it’s all because of that work that you have to do to put them together to make them interesting and give people that aha moment. “Oh, wow, I didn’t know that.”
CR: Okay. So you talked about one that you like in Utah. I know that you own a number of EarthCaches. If you had to point somebody to one of yours, just one, one of your EarthCaches, which one would you tell them to go and see?
CH: Oh, dear.
CR: I’m putting you on the spot here. I didn’t tell you… I didn’t ask you this one ahead of time.
CH: I guess I’d maybe point them to Mima mounds. That’s a strange place that I don’t really teach you what’s happened because nobody has been able to figure it out. It’s Southeast of Olympia. And it’s a basically a big prairie that has goosebumps all over it. There’s just tons and tons of these mounding bits of earth stretching out as far as you can see. And we don’t know why they’re there. There’s a lot of theories, but nobody has been able to prove anything. And they’re huge. They’re like… Well, I’m not gonna give you the answer of their size [laughter] because that’s one of the questions I ask on it.
CR: Yes, it’s a very cool spot. I remember going down there. And I wanna say one of the questions… You even ask people to give their thoughts on what it might be.
[laughter]
CH: Those are fun because no one knows…
CR: I think I might have aliens, but yeah.
CR: Yeah, no one knows, so you could come up with anything. And every time I find a new explanation for how they were made, I add it to the list. [laughter] So we’ve got things like ancient gophers and Paul Bunyan did something…
CR: Sure.
CH: Yeah.
[laughter]
CR: Why not?
CH: It’s a fascinating place. I wish… It’s odd because there’s landscapes like that similarly in other parts of the world, but their conditions of geology is entirely different. So you can’t just say this one thing made this happen because they don’t have any connection to each other, so we have no idea why those are there. [chuckle]
CR: Okay. So Olympia, Washington around there, and then I guess we’ll keep an eye out for this other thing which you have in mind for a long ways from where you live.
CH: That’s gonna be in Central Washington.
CR: Oh, okay. Well, we got a clue, so we’ll keep an eye out for it.
CH: That’s not gonna narrow it down very much ’cause Washington has a huge amount of fascinating geology, especially on the eastern side of the state. So I’ll just keep you guessing.
CR: So with summer coming up here in the northern hemisphere, we can look forward to getting out, and finding some of those EarthCaches.
CH: Alright.
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CR: There you have it. That was Cathy Hornback, a staffer here at Geocaching HQ. She is also a reviewer in Washington State, and she is a very avid Geocacher who owns a number of really nice EarthCaches. If you look her up, her user name is Prying Pandora. We would love to hear your ideas for upcoming episodes. We’ve got a lot of other great topics that we’re gona try to tackle in the coming weeks and months, but you can email us, podcast@geocaching.com. That’s podcast@geocaching.com. And we will do our best to see if we can take your idea and try to get it on here to the podcast. So thanks very much for downloading and listening to the podcast. From all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.
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Chris Ronan: Hi everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. I’m Chris Ronan. My username is Rock Chalk. I am one of the 80 or so people who works at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. Thank you for downloading our podcast. This is our first episode of 2018. Hope your year’s off to a good start. Hope you were able to attend one of the Australia Day Geocaching events a few weeks ago. There’s a lot more neat stuff coming up on the Geocaching calendar as the year rolls on. And as the year continues, we would really like to hear from you about what we should cover on the podcast. What questions do you have, what topics would you like us to dive into? Please email us, the address is podcast@geocaching.com. That is podcast@geocaching com.
CR: You can pause this right now. You can go to your computer or open up your smartphone. You can send me an email podcast@geocaching.com. I’ll wait while you pause and while you send your email. And then when you’re done, come back and we will continue. Whatever your question, I will do my best to find the right person to answer it. Okay, in this episode, we will hear from one of the longest tenured employees at Geocaching HQ. Sean Boots started here way back in 2004. You are certainly aware of his work, whether you realize it or not. He has done quite a few things in 14 years here that impact how we search for geocaches and how we play the game. He’s a very interesting person, I think you’ll enjoy hearing his story. So, here is me talking with Sean Boots.
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CR: Okay. So let’s just start with, what’s your title and what’s a… Just in a nutshell, what you do at HQ every day.
Sean Boots: Cool. I am the manager for the web development team, basically, that does not constitute mobile. It doesn’t constitute IT. It’s a series… A bunch of like 15 people I think is what we have now, and it’s the front end developers, it’s the middle and back end developers of the company.
CR: So it’s the people that work on the website as opposed to working on the mobile apps, is that generally speaking?
SB: Yes. Mostly it’s the web all inclusive, but also the API and all of the services under the cover. We kind of provide the business logic for the web and the mobile applications, but we also do we web stuff themselves. We also do some internal tools and we’re responsible for pager duty, and we’re the ones who, when things go wrong on the website, it’s us and IT who come to the rescue.
CR: You’ve been… So this is 14 years, is that right?
SB: I’m coming up on 14 years, August. Yeah, it’s been 14 years. It’s amazing. And we’ve gone through so many different iterations, I think this is my fourth building. We started in a little dinky building downtown Seattle. It was before Amazon had sort of taken over that whole area. There was a Whole foods, it was like a hole in the ground. And it actually was being built in front of us as we were in that building. And there was seven of us, I think, when I started. We ended up staying in that building for a couple of years. And I think there’s only like two people, other than me, three people total that are still actively working here. It’s changed a lot since then. Yeah. We moved to downtown and then we moved to this area and there are two different buildings in this area, so we’ve been there ever since.
CR: And to give some perspective, seven people then and now it’s around 75 or 80. It’s grown by about 10 times. That’s pretty amazing.
SB: It’s crazy. Yeah. I mean I have… It’s interesting because when I first started, I was very green. I was hired to basically supplement work that Jeremy was doing. I was the first developer other than him. Well, they had had a couple other people do that job, and then they had already left. And from my perspective, I was being hired to supplement Jeremy.
CR: And Jeremy being, for people that don’t know, Jeremy Irish.
SB: Yeah. Sorry. Jeremy Irish.
CR: One of the co-founders of the company.
SB: Yes. The Ray Kroc of Geocaching.
[laughter]
CR: I wonder if anybody’s ever called him that.
SB: Well, I have.
CR: Have you?
SB: I’ve done it for years. [chuckle]
CR: I could see Michael Keaton playing Jeremy in a movie.
SB: I think that’d be awesome.
CR: The founders.
SB: Yeah. They look just like each other.
[laughter]
CR: Who would play Bryan? I don’t know who would?
SB: That’s a good question.
CR: We’ll have to think that one through.
SB: Probably Robert Downey Jr.
CR: Al Pacino. Like a young Al Pacino. Oh, and I like that.
SB: Al Pacino might be a little old at this point.
CR: That’s true. Obviously, that’s why I say… I was thinking like Al Pacino in the Godfather could play Brian but…
[chuckle]
SB: Yeah. That’s it.
CR: But no, I like the Downey Jr idea. Okay, you’re doing that work, supplementing some of Jeremy’s work. Going back to then 2004, what were you doing at that time and how did Geocaching kind of come into your life? How did this opportunity come to you originally?
SB: When I joined, I think I was in the 200,000th of users or something like that. My account is… And I started right as I created my account, basically. And that we weren’t talking about millions of people, we were talking hundreds of thousands. And it was just kinda starting to blow up, and I was really green. It was my first coding job. I had worked for my father for 10 years as a warehouse manager prior to that, and I was a self taught coder who was looking to… I just wanted to get into that industry and so I tried really… I made a bunch of websites.
SB: And this is also the web is just getting started and so just trying to find contracting gigs with whoever I could find. My father’s company had a customer, I would ask them if they needed a website and then I would do it. When I finally decided that I was a good enough programmer, I decided I was going to spread my wings and I was gonna try to get a job somewhere else and I put my resume on monster.com just to sit there, I had no intention of like promoting it or actively doing anything about it, I just wanted to see what would happen if I did it. And so I put all these gigs that I’d done and I had this skill that I have now and I swear it was like within a week I get a email from Jeremy. And he’s like, “Hey it looks like you have a skill set that’s similar to what we’re looking for, can I call you?” I’m like, “Yeah, absolutely that would be kind of cool.”
[laughter]
SB: I mean he’s like, “Yes,” so he calls me literally after I sent the email back, he calls me.
CR: And did you know about Geocaching at all?
SB: I had not, no I had never heard of it. So that was actually my… That moment was my introduction to Geocaching and it was really… That was like, “Hey, this thing exists and there’s an actual job waiting that I could possibly… ” It was kind of interesting. So of course I… He asked me a few questions like wanted to know what my skillset was and it was basically like he and I did the same kind of thing and so it was like a good fit. So he invited me to come in for an interview and then of course I did the whole due diligence let me go and Geocache, and figure out what this is about. I’m gonna find my first cache and I’m gonna be prepared and so then I was able to go into the interview and we kinda just like had a couple of ad-hoc conversations about like, “So you do this technology and this technology?” and I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Okay, cool. So I hear you’re in a band.”
[laughter]
SB: Alright like just do I like you, kinda talk. And so…
CR: Right, right. Okay so you talk to Jeremy he kind of explains what he’s looking for and…
SB: Right. So he offered me the job after that conversation. Alright, this is a good fit and so went home… He calls me, “we got a position for you” and so then it was kind of like, “How do I tell my dad that I’m leaving?”
CR: Right, ’cause you’d been there what? For like 10 years you said.
SB: Yeah, 10 years.
CR: Wow.
SB: And I know and in hindsight he was like, “Why are you still here?
[laughter]
SB: “Will you just go get a job please.”
CR: So I opened up the internet Wayback machine.
SB: Oh yeah, oh this is awesome.
CR: And a look at… And maybe I’ll post this on the podcast page but if I don’t people can go and look at the Internet Wayback machine and just put in Geocaching.com and look in 2004 and so this is what the website would have looked like when you first showed up here.
SB: This is exactly what it looked like. Yeah there’s no denying, this is exactly what it looked like yeah.
CR: So what comes to your mind when you see this now?
SB: My first thought is that, “Well, we’ve come a long way.” And that despite I still have misgivings about where we are, I still wanna keep moving us forward and getting better and making us look prettier and be in a better place. But sometimes you forget like where you came from a little bit, so this is kind of exciting to see that and we’re way…
[laughter]
SB: It’s way better now yeah. So it also reminds me that I actually didn’t work on the Geocaching website in my early part of my career. Actually, the first thing I did was put a Geocaching search functionality into REI kiosks, which for me was really exciting to work with a big partner and do something kind of neat in a visible arena. And so that was really fun and exciting a good first project, but ultimately my job was to figure out with Jeremy a solution for virtual caches and location-less caches which were causing like enormous problems on the website. People were placing really terrible virtual caches and exploiting that concept and we weren’t getting very good quality and reviewers were ready to revolt.
SB: The location lists concept was a great idea, but it was implemented incorrectly because it treated basically, like geocache type locations, were basically being created in the logs. And then there was no way to log the logs and so it was a mismatch despite it being a really cool idea. And so Jeremy and I… Well it wasn’t just Jeremy and I but like the whole group at the time Nate and Bryan and all the people, you know Elias, all these… All of us were talking about what could we do? What’s a good idea, how can we fix this whole problem and ultimately the idea of Waymarking came about, which was to take these location-less caches and created their own website, so categories would become the cache and then the logs would actually be on the same level as caches and then we would actually be able to log the logs at that point. So you’d be able to log the waymarks. But anyways for many years probably five years, that was my core responsibility was to build the Waymarking site from scratch and to add features and keep it maintained and try to get it into a better bigger place.
SB: I mean Nate and I, Nate was kind of like the the product manager for that project and I was the sole developer, and we sort of hashed ideas out together and we pushed features as fast as we could. The community of location-less owners was the root of the beginnings for that site. We asked them all to create categories and we gave them this new site and they all seeded this website with all their location-less caches. Anyhow so the Waymarking was my primary job and at some point we sort of as a company made a decision that we really wanted to focus deeper on the core offering. So Geocaching was our bread-and-butter, it was the piece, it was… The place where community was continuing to develop at a great pace. Waymarking was still doing well, but not nearly at the same level as the Geocaching. And so, we sort of made a decision that we needed to put all our resources on Geocaching. And so, that’s when I started being tasked with doing things for the Geocaching site instead of the Waymarking site.
SB: And for a long time, we tried to build things in the engineering department that would work with both. Like you build one thing for Geocaching and then Waymarking could kind of piggy back off of it. But at some point, we ended up building this monolithic website that we were… It’s basically a solution of code that is… We jokingly call it Tucson. It’s just all of the Geocaching website, all of the Waymarking website, all of everything that we ever did was just put into this big place, and it got to be unwieldy and it became hard to move in any kind of pace, and we decided eventually that we should start splitting those things out into their own projects. And so, Waymarking eventually was pulled out and Geocaching was left, and that ended up being where most of the effort was going. And ever since then, we’ve been progressively getting more professional and just improving all of the performance of that site and the look of it and all that kinda thing.
CR: So as the years have progressed and you have worked your way through various positions, what are some of the things… You talked about Waymarking, some of the other stuff that… Some of the highlights for you over the time that you’ve been here?
SB: We’ve done some major… I mean, that’s been really, really great and terrible things that have happened throughout those years. I think the big… I mean, Waymarking, I would argue, is a highlight for me. I still, I’m actually proud of the work that was done with that. I actually think it’s still a viable idea, and I think it has possibility. So from my perspective, that is still a source of pride. We’ve built full search functionality under the covers. We have separated our accounts and our payment into services. We’re currently making large strides with the maps. We’ve had already made large strides with the maps compared to what had been in the beginning. Where I go is a huge experiment. That actually was the thing… That was like secret project when I was first hired. Like it’s the killer idea. We’re gonna do awesome stuff with this. And to this date, I think that that idea is an amazingly good idea, and I think it’s probably something that we’re not done with, but it’s something that we have to really think about it.
SB: And another moment of huge success for us was, when we embraced the mobile world. The iPhone came out. I kinda have a story about that, ’cause there was a guy that worked as our front desk person. He was very, very eager to get the new iPhone when it came out, when the announcement came out. It’s gonna cost $600 for phone, which seemed like insanity. And I remember myself talking with one of our developers about there’s no way I’ll pay this much for a phone. There’s just no way. I just don’t see it. Like I’ve got my Sony Walkman phone. That’s all I need.
[laughter]
SB: I mean, come one. I just plug a headset in and I got my music here. It’s pretty awesome. But anyhow, I think obviously, the iPod had already been out. But when the iPhone came out, it was like a… Obviously, life-changing… Grand change of how society works, and many of us were just kind of like rolling our eyes at it thinking it was like, “Ah. Here we go. Another thing.” But this guy, and also Jeremy, I give Jeremy… He was on it, too. But they saw it immediately and basically, immediately pivoted the company towards like, “We gotta get going on this, because pocket PCs are not cutting the master for this. We’re gonna start building a mobile app, we’re gonna start hiring API developers, we’re gonna start doing this.” And so, Jeremy, I’ve gotta give him a lot of credit. And I wasn’t in any kind of senior manager position at the time, so I honestly don’t know if it was all Jeremy or if it was… I don’t how, who is responsible for those decisions at the time, but I always attributed it to Jeremy just because like having a foresight to get on that quickly and moved out forward. That was really a good thing.
CR: You’ve mentioned API a couple of times, and for people that might… I don’t think I understood it very well at all before I came to work here just as a geocacher, I heard the term but I wasn’t a software guy, so I didn’t… So for people that might not know what API is, could you just give a brief summary, so people might have a little bit better understanding that might not know what it is.
SB: Sure. So API is… The name is Application Programming Interface. It’s basically a way to connect an application like a website or an app to underlying functionality. We would basically build this underlying business logic. How the game is played, you basically… We present this to our mobile device, and then from outside of their… In the world that that device will call the API and that’s how it has access to our data. Our website does the same thing. Internally, it’ll actually call the APIs and get the data that way. And so, the mobile and the web are sharing the same code and the same data underlying. And it actually is really nice, because when you code one thing in one place and the rules apply to both places. We also have a partner program which allows… It’s currently kind of on hold, but we have partners that we work with that are able to access our data similarly to our own devices and websites through this interface. We provide them with methods, like log a geocache, or get the geocache data, or search for the geocaches, or whatever. But whatever we can provide for them.
SB: They would be able to program their apps such that they can call into our interface, our data and use the data that… So they can have an app experience that either enhances the Geocaching. Like something that GSAK might be doing or actually, is a similar experience, like what Cachly does. So both of those are using our APIs to run their businesses or whatever. Some people, and I will mention names, like CGO, tend to use… They are not actually using our API, they’re actually scrapping our website. And a website can behave like an API, in that you can access it in a similar way and you can actually… You basically parse the data that’s on each page and try to pull it down and aggregate it in your own way. And then you can represent that data a certain way. And so, that’s considered usually, to be a kind of a rogue activity, but it’s also a way that you can access data with less security measures and… So it’s sort of a frowned upon thing. But some people do it and it’s hard to get around people doing that but it’s a big job to actually do that because the data and the underlying website constantly changes. And so you’re gonna have to play kind of a Whac-A-Mole game. With the API you’re sort of ensured that the signatures, which are the… It’s hard to explain.
SB: But the structure of the calls that you’re gonna make always remain that way. And if they change, you will get notified that we’re making that change so you would… There’s sort of a contract aspect to it, where we get to decide what this contract is, you’re going to agree to call in that form and then we can move. And you have an allotted amount of calls that you can make or you can’t go too crazy or we’ll throttle you. The idea is that we create this place where we can partner with people and then they would give us… They will work with us to try to create a premium prop value that is consistent across the boards. So the Geocaching experience for somebody who uses Cachly and somebody who uses our app, and somebody who uses GSAK, is very similar, that’s what the hope is. It isn’t always work like that in practice but that’s the goal, is to make it more close to that. When somebody like a CGO does it through scrapping the website, it’s a little bit harder to understand how they’re using it. A lot of times they end up giving away features that are for free and so things that people, premium members are paying for us to provide these services for them.
SB: It’s basically, you’re providing that… You’re making CGO be able to exist too because they’re riding on the backs of the premium members. So it’s a little bit frustrating to have that kind of a situation happen and we would love to have somebody like CGO actually use our API, so that we would be a partner as opposed to… It’s a more of a parasitical, sort of a… Not necessarily symbiotic relationship. So there’s… We don’t know how to solve that problem and we understand that a lot of our community uses CGO, so it isn’t necessarily in our interest to just shut them down but it does constantly undermine our program with other well meaning partners.
CR: So outside of your work stuff, I noticed that last year was your best year for Geocaching. You found…what did I write down here, 134 caches last year. So what got into you last year? I gotta know.
SB: Well, I will say it’s a little embarrassing that I haven’t found more caches than I actually have but that’s part of the answer is that I was moved into this job and I felt like I needed to take it seriously and so I should learn the product a little better than I had. I also was inspired by a program that we have internally, it’s called the Geo Guide program. Kind of set up a series of achievements, and goals, and incentives, and rewards to help us to have a reason to go do stuff. And so there’s things like streaks, which I got a 60 geocache streak last year which I was pretty proud of before I finally… I don’t know what it was that stopped me, but I think it was that… I was starting to run out of places around my neighborhood and I was finding myself in like supermarket parking lots at 10:30 in the night.
[laughter]
SB: I’m like, “I don’t know if this is really what I’m gonna be doing for the next six months or whatever.”
CR: Geocaching has a fantastic community, people all over the world and I know you’ve interacted with people all over the world, right? Over the course of your many years here, is that something that you’ve enjoyed, getting to meet people from different countries and getting to see how the game is played in different places?
SB: Oh for sure. I mean I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to travel several different places, I’ve gone to Austria, there was a caching festival there. It was amazing, it was beautiful area. I got to go to Munich, I was able to see Salzburg and so just that… Geocaching in those areas was just really, really crazy. It’s just so fun to see how it manifests elsewhere. This thing that we dreamt about when we were first starting this out and to see it just like it’s a pox.
[laughter]
SB: A positive pox that it goes out and spreads across the globe and then all of a sudden to actually see it. It’s so exciting to just… I don’t know, so it was really great. And so… Also I should mention that the treatment that a Geocaching employee gets when you go to a mega event it’s like… [chuckle] I sort of have a very tiny amount of experience with what the surface feeling of what it’s like to be a rock star. I’ve been in a band and we had a modicum of success but going to a Geocaching mega event as a Geocaching HQ employee is… For me, it felt more like being a rock star than being a rock star. You get put in front of 500 people to speak. It’s like, “I didn’t play for crowds like that, ever.” Here I am, put on the spot. They wanna hear what I have to say about this game that I don’t even play nearly like the way that they do. But because my experience is what it is, there’s something that people are interested in there. And I just feel honored I guess, that they treat us that kinda way.
CR: Well, I’m so glad you brought up being a rock star because that was my last question for you. I’ve gotta ask, I’ve gotta ask about the Sean Boots music career. ‘Cause it’s kinda legend around here. But we don’t hear the story as often as we should.
SB: When I was a kid, I was… My parents got me to playing piano and I got to be pretty interested in that. And I got into song writing and through my college years, I wrote a whole bunch of songs, and played with some kind of goofy cover bands, and had a little bit fun with it. But as I graduated, I ended up joining a band and we call ourselves, “The Amateur Lovers,” which is kinda hilarious because there’s now a genre on the internet that Amateur Lovers is, and you probably don’t wanna look it up. But we had no… There was no internet when we started this band. So that name was purely by accident.
CR: It’s an awesome name though.
[laughter]
SB: I know. And the funny thing is, we didn’t even start by… We were actually, “The Young Lovers,” was our original name. And we got sued by a band in Massachusetts called, “Young Love,” and they gave us a Seize and Desist letter. And so we’re like, “Ah, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna call ourselves?” And so then there’s… We had a song that was actually called, “Amateur Lover,” and so I’m like, “Well, Amateur Lover song, is like… There used to be a band that had an album called, “Living in a Box,” and they had a song called, “Living in a Box,” and their band name was, “Living in the Box.” And so was like, “Are we really gonna do this?”
[laughter]
SB: “Like we’re gonna be, The Living In The Box,” our album’s, “Amateur Lovers song, Amateur Lovers… ” Answer, No. So we took the name, we became, “Amateur Lovers.” We changed the name of the song to something called, “Grand Debut.” And then we didn’t name our album after that. But anyways, we had a little bit of a run where we played in the Seattle post-grunge scene, we played around town all the shows, we had good fortune to… We got to hook up with a couple of really talented engineer friends that got us some free time at London Bridge studio and they helped us to make a record. And they got that record put into front of some people of importance that had abilities to make things happen, and one of which was Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam. And we ended up signing with his label. And then subsequently, signing with a couple of labels in Australia and in Japan. So we had a world wide distribution of our record, one record. And we were the kind of my heyday was to be basically they send us to Australia on a tour with Ben Folds Five, which at the time was my favourite band.
CR: That would be so cool.
SB: It was the most dreamy, crazy, yeah, it was crazy. And they were… So they brought us along, we played four shows, we made a video, an all boys scout warehouse. MTV came and filmed the making of the video. I solved the Rubik’s Cube on camera, which made me really proud of myself, ’cause I didn’t think I was gonna pull it off. But…
CR: [chuckle] Oh my gosh.
SB: That was cool. But of course they didn’t use any of the footage. They only used footage of us telling the world how great Pearl Jam was. I was like, “Pearl Jam, has a new record. Let’s check out what Amateur Lovers has to say about that.” “Oh, it’s great.”
CR: I’m sure that helped Pearl Jam out a lot.
SB: Yeah, it totally did.
[laughter]
SB: But more than it helped us out. [chuckle] But…
CR: So it was just the one album?
SB: One album. There’s a video, you can find that’s an embarrassing like dated looking one. It’s called, “Rubik’s Cube.” It’s on YouTube.
CR: We’re definitely putting that on the podcast page.
SB: Oh gosh.
CR: It’ll have to be there.
SB: To be honest, I’m proud of it. I actually think the lyrics are great. I love the message in it. It’s pretty, pretty dated though. It’s literally 20 years old. I have long hair, I look kinda dorky and everybody makes fun of me at the end ’cause I get all tough guy and when I close it’s bad. It’s an era bygone, I had a clean cut-off. I quit the band when we lost our record deal and there’s a story when I was… We were touring our last tour in California. I kinda had seen the writing on the wall, and I knew that I needed to think about what was gonna be the next chapter. And so for me, it was to… It was about basically, I had a feeling that coding was kinda gonna be my thing. ‘Cause I had done that as a kid and I liked it. So I was like, “I’m gonna figure this out, I’mma learn how to do it.” And so I’m sitting in the tour van reading a visual basic, “How to,” instruction manual for pretty much the entire tour. That was how I kept myself busy and the guys in the band are like, “Why are you reading that book?” Like, “What does this mean? Are you like one foot out the door or whatever?” And I didn’t think I was at the time, but it turns out that I actually was.
SB: And so, there’s sort of like a segue right there, of me having my two worlds sort of collide and it was a clean break. I never really… I never went back. And so I haven’t done anything musical ever since, other than a couple… Actually it’s probably something to note is that some of that songs, some of the background music in some of our Geocaching videos, is actually me having done the music for that. I don’t know if you ever saw… If anybody, you can go look it up. The cachers of steel video, that underlying music is actually me, in my studio at home. It’s just instrumental music, but all the geocachers, like doing geocaching workouts, that was my thing. And then there was a, “How to,” Geocaching video also that I had done the music for… I kinda worked with Reid, our videographer. She would occasionally give me some gigs, I guess you can say, so that was a cool way to take my personal interest and kinda merge it with my work interest, it was really fun. It’s a lot of work though, I don’t know how much I’ll be doing that in the future. But it was cool to do, back in those days.
CR: Well that’s really cool. This has been really interesting. Thank you.
SB: Cool, I had a really good time, I didn’t realize I’d have so much to say. Yeah, thanks for having me.
CR: So there you have it. Sean Boots, one of the long time Geocaching HQ staffers, hope you enjoyed that. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, let us know what you would like to hear about on the podcast, by emailing us podcast@geocaching.com is the address, that’s podcast@geocaching.com or if you see me or one of my co-workers at a Geocaching event, please share your podcast ideas with us there. Thanks again for listening, from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.
[music]
Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, this is Inside Geocaching HQ. This is our podcast, welcome. We are happy to have you. I am Chris Ronan, your host. It has been a busy time at HQ since our last episode, lots happening around here. There are now 3 million active geocaches in the world, huge milestone. Hopefully, you went out and you found the cache to get the souvenir that marked that occasion. We also had another souvenir opportunity with Cache In, Trash Out week, and another souvenir on Big Blue Switch Day, that is May 2nd, when we, essentially, celebrate the day that geocaching became possible back in the year 2000. Today, we are talking about some of the new features and changes to the Geocaching website and to our app. I will talk with Ben Hewitt about the “Send to Garmin” feature. That’s a cool new toy for those of us who cache with our Garmin GPS devices. First though, I have a chat about logging changes with three folks at HQ who have been very involved in updating the way that we will all log geocaches via the app and the website. The changes will be noticeable, but they are necessary, and I personally think that they will make logging a lot more efficient. So here is me and a few of my fellow HQers, Nadja, Becca and Stuart, talking logging.
[music]
Chris: Okay. So today we’re talking about the logging process on Geocaching.com and the Geocaching app, and we have Stuart, Nadja and Becca who are all very involved in working on logging in at HQ, in addition to lots of other stuff that they do, so maybe first we’ll hear about what they do. So Stuart, how long have you been at HQ? What is the overview of what you do at the office everyday?
Stuart Schwartz: Well, alright. Howdy. My name is Stuart Schwartz, and I am a lead developer on one of the delivery teams here at Geocaching HQ. I’ve been at the company near six years. As a lead, I effectively direct the technology as it’s being built by this team. I am one of three components to how that’s directed. There’s a technology side, a product side, and a UX side.
Nadja Conklin: Hi, I’m Nadja. I’ve been at HQ for a little over two years. I’m a product manager at HQ and I work on the web team, specifically with a core team of people including Stuart, Becca and myself, and a couple other very dedicated engineers. And yeah, as a product manager, what I do is I spend most of my time doing research and planning for projects and then helping make sure that projects and features get out the door smoothly and efficiently and in a great way that helps our users.
Becca Olson: Hi, I’m Becca. I’m a UX designer at Geocaching HQ, and I’ve been here for about four years. I work with Stuart and Nadja along with the rest of the team to make sure that the things that we’re designing work well for people. So I test them with people and work with Nadja to do research beforehand and also do the visual design.
Chris: So before we get into some of the stuff that’s gonna be changing here in the coming weeks with regards to logging your geocaches, Stuart, can we talk just first about, I think it’s just such an interesting process, just think about the fact that you have tens of millions of logs every year on ocaching.com and through the app. I think last year there was something like 80 million found logs, and I would assume there are some challenges and some… Some interesting things that you have to work through to make sure, from an engineering standpoint, all of that stuff happens the way that it should happen.
Stuart: Indeed, that’s true. First and foremost, I think the biggest challenge is not losing data or corrupting data from the past. So this game has been around for quite a while, near 15 some odd years, almost 16, I believe we just had 16. We’ve ended up with nearly one billion logs. We’re somewhere around 800 million at the moment, this is geocache and trackable logs. So the sheer volume is pretty intense and when we look at it as a whole, it’s a little overwhelming, but one piece at a time, it’s manageable.
Nadja: Okay. So we’ve talked about the enormity of the whole thing and now we have some… People are gonna start noticing some changes here in the next few weeks, next month or so. Nadja, can we talk first about why before we get into what the changes are, why are these changes going to be happening?
Nadja: Sure. Well, like Stuart was mentioning, the game has been around for about 16 years and there’s been a lot of change at HQ recently. So we’re addressing some growing pains along the way. And on the website, that’s namely… It’s around old code. Our existing logging page is in old code. And what that means is it limits the ability to work on logging and logging-related projects, namely drafts and syncing up with mobile and allowing some fun features like photos of favorite points in drafts. Without a new logging page, we wouldn’t be able to do things like that. Also old code dependencies can slow down development process, anyone that has worked in engineering, I’m sure, is familiar with that, which means that we can’t respond to customer problems as quickly as we would like to. And also the existing logging page, it’s not localized or mobile responsive. So, by working on a new logging page, we can address all of those things and also make some improvements along the way, including UX improvements and tackling some things with time zones and other exciting things.
Chris: Okay. So, there’s some interesting challenges there that need to be met and a lot of research I’m sure has gone into figuring out how to address those challenges. So, Becca, can you talk about that a little bit. What kind of research do we do, as a company, to figure out how to address these issues?
Becca: Yeah. We did a lot of research coming into this project about how people log geocaches, how people log maintenance and needs archived logs, things like that. And we do a lot of talking to users all over the world. We’ll do phone interviews and ask and we also watch them go through the current logging flow and see where they run into problems and pain points, and then we’ll take the information from all of that and start to recognize where we can improve and how we could make changes. And then once we have the product designed and developed, we’ll release it slowly to beta testers and to play testers, and ask them questions, ask for feedback along the way, and we can make changes before doing a full release to everyone.
Chris: And there are changes that are made along the way to, aren’t there? I think that there’s a thought among some people, not just with geocaching products, but any product, they think, “Oh, they’re just gonna give us what they want to give us and that’s just it.” But as beta testers know, you guys make a lot of little adjustments along the way based on the feedback that you get.
Becca: Yeah, absolutely. That’s why we wanna release to small groups at a time, and so we can gather that feedback and make quick changes before we release to everyone. And then even after we release to everyone, we’ll continue to gather feedback and make sure that we’re making changes that make it the best workflow possible.
Chris: So, as your team was doing research, Becca, was there anything that came as a surprise to you, that caught you off guard?
Becca: Yeah. With the report a problem, research, specifically, we went into that with the hypothesis that people were not logging needs maintenance, or needs archived logs because they were afraid of offending the cache owner. And as we talked to people and watched the way people did that workflow, we learned that that is partially the case, but it was also largely that people didn’t understand the difference between needs maintenance and needs archived. They maybe didn’t understand what the output of that was, who was being notified once they submitted one of those, where that log was gonna be posted. And then also people weren’t a fan of writing two separate logs, so if they’re already writing a found it log, having to go back through that process and writing a second one for needs maintenance, or needs archived. And so collecting that data was a little bit different than what we expected, and we used that to design the new workflow.
Chris: Okay. So, Nadja, what kind of things are people going to start noticing as they’re logging caches here in the next several weeks?
Nadja: Well, aside from a brand spanking new logging page that is mobile-responsive and localized and looks pretty great. One of the most exciting things is the way that Becca was referring to, how players report a problem. In the research that Becca was referring to, we learned a lot about how users do or don’t report a problem, and we noticed that there was some confusion that players were having with reporting, “It needs maintenance,” or “It needs archived.” Not knowing where that information was sent to or what benefits it has for the game. So what we wanted to do was really empower users to report problems, and in an easy way, that didn’t require them to write two different logs because we know how important it is for the community, not only with letting cache owners know when there’s something wrong with their cache, but also improving cache quality in general.
Nadja: So, something that players will see is a little flag on the bottom of… Below the log text box that allows a user to report a problem right in the context. And it’ll allow to select from some of the most commonly reported problems with caches like a wet log book or something like that. And that will be appended directly to the log text, and then on the other side, when it is on the cache details page, you’ll see not only your original log text but a separate log that shows the needs maintenance, or the needs archived log. Another great win is that players can now attach photos while they’re logging rather than waiting until after they’ve logged a geocache, which I think is a pretty big win. And we’ve also aligned a lot of things with mobile and how favorite points are awarded, things like that. So, overall, I think it’s a pretty seamless experience.
Chris: And there are some rule changes too with logging, correct? And we’ve announced a little bit of that before, but maybe we could just… People that haven’t heard, some of the changes that will be coming in that regard too.
Nadja: Yeah, exactly. So there will be some log type changes, things that we’ve wanted to do as a company for a really long time and things that our community has asked for. So, those include duplicate logs. So, for example, once you’ve found a log you won’t be able to log that find again and that would go the same for events, attending, and will attend, and webcam photo taken. And then also for cache owners, we’re making some changes there that align with the vision of the game. Cache owners will no longer be able to find DNF or needs maintenance their own caches.
Chris: Of course, change is always hard for anybody and it’s especially difficult when you’ve been logging a certain way for so long. I’m sure that there’s going to be educational opportunities here, via help center, and stuff like that. And then also a chance for people to give feedback. Correct?
Nadja: That’s absolutely correct. Throughout… When you’re using the new logging page, we’ll have an area for users to give feedback via a survey and also a link to the blog post with a lot more information on how to use the page and also connecting with any forum notes about the project as well.
Chris: So then, Stuart, getting back to the engineering side of things, we make these changes and how logging is handled, that sound pretty significant compared to what is… The way it’s been done for a long time, how does that change things on the engineering side?
Stuart: That’s a great question. Nadja mentioned earlier that we had some older code in place and that was preventing us from moving quickly, that’s pretty true. Part of the problem is that our technology, our code stack from previous years is deprecated technology, so it’s difficult to find pre-built assemblies and libraries that work with it and it’s difficult to find programmers who can work with it as well. So in today’s era, we’ve been moving to newer technologies and while moving to a newer technology, we had to make a decision, do we just port over what’s existing or we do freshen it up and give users what we believe we will converge on as a better experience? We went with the latter. The technology we chose is MVC with a single page app running on top of it, I won’t go into too many details, but it leverages an API that feeds the front end with data rather than being tightly coupled through post-backs as older web forms technology used to rely on.
Chris: And so there’s a few people out there nodding their heads and saying, “That sounds amazing,” but just, in general, it sounds like it’ll make things a lot smoother for the engineers here and enable us to move more quickly in the future, right?
Stuart: Indeed, it will allow us to move more quickly and it will allow us more flexibility in our UI, our user interface. The user interface maybe will be able to leverage functionality, the same functionality on multiple locations on our site in the future. That’s pretty exciting for an agility point of view as we want to roll out features in new areas, leveraging existing functions.
Chris: One thing we haven’t hit on yet is time zones and that is something that a lot of people may not even think about, it may not have ever affected them, but there are certain parts of the world where we hear about it quite a bit, about how the website or the app handles time zones, Nadja, how are things gonna change in that regard?
Nadja: Things are gonna change for the better. We’ve been making a lot of steps to get to a good place with time zones. For anyone that’s worked with time zones or even just done a brief Google search on time zones will know that it’s very complicated and especially with our game, it’s really important that we have time zones correct. So that doesn’t just mean for people living in Seattle, it means for people living all over the world. So what we’re doing is moving towards having time zones in the time zone of the cache. So that means that everywhere on our site in all the cache details pages, all the logs will be in the time zone of the cache which has taken a lot of work to get us here. We are very nearly done with that, it should be all in place across web and mobile in the next few weeks.
Chris: And so how does that differ for people that aren’t aware, who haven’t been affected, how does that differ from how it’s been up until this point?
Nadja: Right. So up until this point, if you were perhaps traveling to another country and you came back to your home country and were logging a cache, you might see that your date was off by a day, maybe ahead or behind. This will erase that confusion and prevent logs from being out of order, it will prevent maybe a published listing happening after some geocache logs were made. It will really just align all of those logs that come through and make sure that they’re in the correct order and in the time zone of the cache.
Stuart: So to speak to the technical side of time zones, again, this company is been around for quite a while and the code base has been around for quite a while and these features, they didn’t all start at the same time, they were tacked on at some point or another. So, in the beginning, there was just a website and the website you were allowed to put in whatever date you wanted, and it didn’t really matter what time zone or what time was specified with your find. That was… It was easy and cool and everything was just in Seattle, but as the game became more popular around the world, moved across continents, we ended up finding that people were entering the date where they think they found it, which is in their own time zone, which is where the cache is generally. So we ended up with this heterogeneous collection of time zones with the dates associated with each visit, and it’s a little confusing especially if you’re not in the same time zone as the geocache.
Stuart: But as long as everything’s listed out on the site exactly how it went in, everything kind of works out. What ended up getting really confusing was later, sometime later, we introduced mobile applications. And the mobile applications all uploaded their time zones in pacific time, no matter where you were, which would render out to the website in pacific time. So if a person had logged a find in the time zone of the cache where they thought they were and then their friend had logged it via the app at the same time in the same location, they would show up possibly as two different dates if they’re on different sides of the planet.
Stuart: So normally, these would be simple fixes, but as I mentioned earlier, ultimate goal is not to lose data so this data has come into our system with these assertions of time that aren’t necessarily correct, but they are what people have come to rely on as truth of what they’ve done. So while fixing time zones, we’ve worked really hard to coalesce everything into a similar paradigm while not losing past data. And we think we’ve done it by pushing everything into the time zone of the cache, all logs coming in through uploading field modes, through mobile apps, through our APIs, and through the web, will all come in and be stored in the timezone of the cache and displayed in the timezone of the cache. So, we believe that will create a nice, unified experience.
[music]
Chris: There’s only one person I know who can make time zones sound cool, and that is Stuart. Great talk there with Nadja, Becca, and Stuart. If you have questions about the logging changes as they are happening, please read the geocaching blog. There is a lot of great information there. So if you go to blog.geocaching.com www.geocaching.com/blog, you can read all about the logging changes, and of course, lots of other geocaching-related stuff. Also the geocaching help center will have information about the logging changes there as well. Okay, next up, “Send to Garmin.” Those of us who like to cache with a GPS device know the workflow for getting caches onto the device can be fairly involved. That is why we were very excited to release the new “Send to Garmin” feature on the website. Ben Hewitt was the point person on that project and we talked all about it.
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Chris: So we released “Send to Garmin” and it’s a great feature for those of us that own Garmin devices and Ben worked on this project with the folks at Garmin and with several folks here at HQ. I wonder if we could go back to when this project was first beginning. What precipitated it? What were the things that made HQ and Garmin say, this would be a nice feature and this is something that we should start working on?
Ben Hewitt: Absolutely. Anybody who’s been around Geocaching.com long enough knows that we have a “Send to GPS” feature on cache details pages and on the little map previews on our browsing map. And anybody who’s used those long enough also knows that those have been breaking more and more over time. It’s a really handy feature if you’re able to use that. It just pops the file for the cache right on your device without having to do anything else and you can unplug and go geocaching. And we know that people love that. We’d heard a lot of support inquiries and foreign posts, and we’d seen just a lot of feedback about, “Hey, this used to work, it’s not working anymore, and it was really important to me.”
Ben: So we heard that message loud and clear. And so a while ago, I went to Bryan (Roth) and I said, “Hey Bryan, you need to set me up with a contact at Garmin so we can talk about how to fix this.” Unfortunately, it’s not something that either Garmin or us could fix with the existing “Send to GPS” functionality because the reason that doesn’t work anymore is that modern browsers don’t support that technology anymore. If you really want to do some research, you can go Googling around about this. If you check out Garmin’s communicator plugin page, they have a link to a blog from Google that explains why that technology is no longer supported, and it’s for your benefit and my benefit, and everybody’s benefit because it’s more secure. So good thing for your computer security, bad thing for “Send to GPS” technology.
Ben: So we knew we needed to do something different and we knew that we wouldn’t be able to do that by ourselves. I started working with some folks at Garmin a while ago, and I said, “Hey, how can we do this differently? We can’t do ‘Send to GPS’ anymore, you know that, we know that. What can we do differently?” They spent a little time thinking about options and they came back to us and said, “We think we could do this kind of functionality with our Garmin Express software.” If you have a Garmin device, you may already be familiar with that software. It’s really useful for keeping your device’s firmware updated. You can load new maps with it. It’s a good device management tool for your Garmin GPSs and watches, and other gizmos, if you have those. Garmin said they would build some new functionality into Garmin Express for us and for other partners that they have, but we became the guinea pig for Garmin to try something new out.
Ben: And so, it took quite a bit of back and forth. They would build something into Garmin Express, we built some new services on our end, and then they would send us a beta-build of the software and we would test. And we’d give them feedback, and they would give us feedback on our end. So there was a long period of back and forth where we were really trying to get it right, trying to set this up to be the best experience we can have it be for our mutual customers, for people who are geocachers and Garmin GPS users. That led us to the point that we got to this week, which is releasing our first version of “Send to Garmin” functionality that uses Garmin Express, and we added that on the new lists page where you can… Using Garmin Express, you can now, with a click of a button, send an entire list of geocaches to your Garmin device using Garmin Express.
Chris: So let’s talk about how it works then… You need a Garmin device, obviously. You need Garmin Express software. So somebody who’s new to this, what are the steps? I want to start using “Send to Garmin.” How do I go about it?
Ben: So there’s lots of ways that you could go through it. My personal favorite is to go to the homepage, the search page, run a search, find the caches that I’m interested in. Maybe it’s just everything in a big region or maybe it’s some specific things that I’m interested in, for the geocaching I’m doing today. Check the boxes along the side. I add them to a list, and then I go to the list page, and over on the right of each list, there’s a little dot dot dot menu, a little circle with three dots in it. If you click that, you’ll see the Send to Garmin button in there. Like you said, Chris, you have to have Garmin Express installed for this to work. You have to have your device added in Garmin Express.
Ben: Both Garmin and we, did quite a bit of work trying to onboard people to this flow, and so if you don’t have those things ready to go when you go try this, we’ve got some, but we hope our helpful pop-ups that coach you through the process of, “Here’s a link to go get Garmin Express.” Garmin has good instructions about how to set Garmin Express up. And then we have, on the lists page, some instructions about where to find it. So then, of course, though, you can create a list in lots of ways. You can add caches to a list from the map, you can add from cache details, you can add it through partner apps, and other mobile applications and desktop applications. So any way you can create a list is great, and then once you have that list, then you go back to the lists page and send it to Garmin from there.
Chris: It’s interesting when you… And I know you’ve talked to a lot of people about this too, how many different ways people have to get geocaches onto their device. And I know for me, personally, the way I would get my list onto my Garmin is, “Okay, you run a pocket query and then you gotta download the file, and then you gotta find the file and put it on to your… ” This is a… For me, personally, it’s a great streamline thing, but of course, there are other ways that… A lot of people just like being able to send that one cache onto their device. And I would imagine there’s a lot of different ways then that this functionality can find its way through the website. Maybe you could speak to at least just the possibilities of that, although we can’t say for certain exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow and the next day.
Ben: For sure, so we wanted to try something new out, that’s what this is. We know it’s brand new, we know it’s gonna take a little bit of learning for people to get used to it. And we thought that, given all we’ve done with lists over the past few years, that this was a really good first place to try it. What we released this week is not meant as a replacement for anything just yet, it’s meant as a cool new toy for people who find that workflow useful. That said, we’re also… We put in… We’re monitoring usage of this feature, we’re listening to feedback, we wanna know how it works for people and if this is a good tool for them. And if it is, then we’re absolutely… We’d love to add it to some other places, including, potentially, replacing the existing Send to GPS which still works, but you have to jump through some pretty serious hoops to get it to work. So this is a start, what we did this week, it’s not the end game, it’s a start of trying something new, it’s a start of trying a different collaboration with Garmin. I’m pretty excited about what we have to offer today, but we also know that there’s more work to do.
Chris: So there are some parameters with using this software and this new functionality, of course, you need to have a device that is supported by Garmin Express, and in our testing, I know we found that that can go back many years. There are some very old devices that do work, but there are some that don’t and that’s an unfortunate reality, right?
Ben: That’s the long and short of it. I know that Garmin has worked hard to make Garmin Express support as many of their devices as possible, but like a lot of software, and like a lot of device life spans, there are things that are no longer supported. So I feel the pain of people whose device may not be supported by Garmin Express. I’ve had some trusty old GPSs that I’ve beaten into the ground until the buttons were falling off. So I know that feeling of the beloved partner. But we are doing our best and I know Garmin is doing their best to support a wide variety of products, but the truth is that not all of them are supported by Garmin Express.
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Chris: So there’s some background on the Send to Garmin functionality. Thanks to Ben for his time. Thanks again to Nadja, Becca, and Stuart for chatting about the logging changes. Good episode, hope you enjoyed it, we would love to hear what you would like us to cover on this podcast. Please drop us a line. Podcast@geocaching.com is the address. That is podcast at Geocaching.com. A few of you have written in with ideas, we’re gonna try to cover those in the coming weeks but keep those ideas coming, podcast at Geocaching.com. Thanks for stopping by, we will talk again soon. In the meantime, from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.
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