Ep 63: Not-so-hidden features in the Geocaching® app

If you’re new to the official Geocaching® app or even if you use it regularly, new features may have flown under your radar in recent months. Nicole from HQ’s Mobile Team is here to chat about a few of her favorites.

You can listen to the episode via this page, or on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify. If you use an aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, you can access the RSS feed here.

A full transcript is available here.

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Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Ep 63: Not-so-hidden features in the Geocaching® app
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Inside Geocaching HQ transcript (episode 63): Not-so-hidden features in the Geocaching app

(link to podcast)

0:00:14.4 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody and welcome to inside Geocaching HQ. This is the podcast about things that are happening at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. My name is Chris Ronan. My geocaching username is Rock Chalk and we are in HQ at this very moment. Sometimes I’m in my house when I do this thing, but I’m at HQ because I get the chance to have a real life in person conversation with Nicole from the mobile team who I meant to look this up before we started. How many times you’ve been on the podcast, Nicole, because you’re part of like the three or four timers club. I’m not sure. Have you ever watched on Saturday Night Live? They have this running joke with hosts that have hosted X number of times. I feel like we should have that for the podcast. I think Brian would probably be the leader, but I think you’re right up in there. ‘Cause you’ve been on a number of times in your various roles at the company. So, we’re gonna be talking about the Geocaching app because you’re on the mobile team. But let’s get started first by telling people who you are, what you do at HQ and what you’ve done. ‘Cause you’ve been here for several years now at HQ.

0:01:23.2 Nicole Jendro: Yeah, it’s good to be back. Thank you for having me again. My name is Nicole. My username is Nykkole written N-Y-K-K-O-L-E. I’ve been at HQ for eight years now. And I started out on the team with you, Chris.

0:01:39.6 CR: That’s right.

0:01:40.9 NJ: Do you remember back in the day?

0:01:44.1 CR: And you escaped.

0:01:44.2 NJ: So I was doing review support, volunteer support and then I moved into a product role. And so I was a product manager on the website. And now for the last, oh gosh, three-ish, four-ish years, maybe I’ve been…

0:02:02.6 CR: Time’s just a mess now, isn’t it? [laughter]

0:02:02.7 NJ: I’ve been the product manager on the mobile app.

0:02:07.1 CR: Yeah. And so you’ve had this great amount of experience throughout the company over the years and now with the mobile team for a few years. And so, today we’re gonna talk about, I guess what we’re calling not so hidden features within the Geocaching app. And I think this conversation, the idea for it maybe even dates back to when we were in Colorado geocaching together earlier this year and we were walking along and you were showing me different stuff. And I think for some people… Somebody like me who thinks of themselves as a really experienced geocacher, and I think you can’t teach me anything. I know all there is to know, but somebody like me, I get into my routine. At least I know how I think to do everything with the app or with the GPS or whatever I’m using to go find caches.

0:02:55.9 CR: And I’m in a routine and I don’t really deviate from that routine very much. And then somebody like you says, “Hey, did you know about this?” And I’m like well, “No, not really, because that’s on a screen that I don’t think to tap on.” And so that’s what this conversation is about is kind of talking about some of those things that maybe you do know about them, but maybe you’re like me and you just look up one day and you’re like “Oh wait,” HQ’s mobile team has added a bunch of stuff since I started using this app and I’ve missed some of the stuff that’s… There wasn’t a huge announcement about it or maybe there was and I missed it. So that’s kinda what this is about and there is a lot of cool stuff. And I think the thing we were gonna start with was how to find cool caches or some of the tools that might lead you to finding some of the more interesting caches that are out there by using the Geocaching app.

0:03:47.4 NJ: Yeah. One of my favorite things that we released early this year is the indicator of highly favorite caches on the map. It’s that pink heart. And so as the map loads, you get about 300 caches and the top 10% will be highlighted. And so what I really like about this feature is that as you travel instead of using the filter to say, I want any caches that have more than 50 favorite points, well if you are in… I don’t know, rural Wisconsin, you might only get two caches. I don’t know that for a fact. No offense to rural Wisconsin.

0:04:21.9 CR: Yeah, That was a very specific example. Just throwing out rural Wisconsin. But there’s some great caches. I was there for the West Bend Mega earlier this year, which you’ve been to as well in the past.

0:04:32.9 NJ: I have. And that’s why I used this feature. And so I know for a fact that there’s a lot of cool caches in Wisconsin because we used highly favorite caches on the map to identify them.

0:04:42.2 CR: And I really love that feature too. And there’s been a lot of discussion I’ve seen among the community about, “oh, well they should use percentage of favorite points or as opposed to,” well, we’ve got the reasons. It would be a huge low difference. I’m sure to do percentage, but just total favorite points. Is such a big improvement over not having anything like it was before.

0:05:00.8 NJ: Yeah, we did actually look at what it would look like with percentage just, and between the two algorithm, there was only about a 10% difference. So, and there is like having the percentage, it has its own issues, right? No algorithm is perfect. And so if a new cache gets published and the first person gives it a favorite point, now it’s at 100%. But if you find a cache that I hide, I hope you give it a favorite point. That would be very skewed.

0:05:24.7 CR: So yeah, the high favorite point indicator is… I’ve really loved it as I’ve been traveling and it’s all, I don’t know, it’s kind of almost gotten a little exciting when I see the heart pop up and it makes me think, oh, that’s something I need to check out. So that’s a good one.

0:05:40.6 NJ: And I’ve actually used it with the filter of minimum favorite points. So, as every region is different, I’ll look at what is this area’s highly favorite caches. And so if it’s, let’s say it’s around 50 for that area, then I will put in 50 and then I will get a wider radius and know every cache on my map that’s highly favorite for that region. But I’ll still get the top 10% of those high favorited caches.

0:06:08.0 CR: Right. I never see right away we’re only what, three minutes into this thing. And I’ve already learned something that I hadn’t thought about. Well, that’s a great way to use it. I hadn’t done that before myself. So next time though, I’m gonna filters.

0:06:22.7 NJ: Yeah, I love using the filters depending on what kind of outing I’m planning. For example, when I go out caching with kids, I like to filter for regular and large, large-sized caches. And then I’ll make sure to bring some little toys that the kids can either leave and have a lesson in letting something go for other people or a trait of theirs, I’ll swag in the cache, attributes filtering for attributes. I do that a lot as well. I really like field puzzles and night caches, although for night caches, I must say it can be confusing to filter it because there’s multiple attributes that could indicate a night cache, like UV light required or flashlight required and if the… So yeah, so I’ll do multiple searches basically if I wanna do a night cache outing, I’ll filter for a night cache recommended at night, flashlight required UV light required, and I put them all on a list and then I have my night cache list.

0:07:19.6 CR: Mystery caches. And a couple of interesting things there that people may or may not know about.

0:07:23.2 NJ: Yeah. For mystery caches and multi-caches as well, I have a little bit of my own routine. So I don’t know there might be better ways to do it, but I use the personal note. So from the cache details page, you can tap the three dots in the top right to open the personal note. So I will copy anything relevant from the description that I need to answer a puzzle out into the personal note. And that’s where then we’ll have the final coordinates or the next stage. And then I copy those coordinates and then I go to waypoints and I paste the coordinates in as a name so that I can easily fill them into the fields for the waypoint.

0:08:00.0 CR: Yeah, that was a game changer when we added to where the personal note syncs with the website. That was something that for the longest time, way back in the day of the old app, when you could do a personal note but it didn’t sync. Oh that was the worst. And so when we added that, and that’s been a few years now. But that was really great.

0:08:23.3 NJ: So for Corrected coordinates, specifically for mystery caches, when you go to the waypoint screen and go into the posted coordinates, you can edit. Tap the edit icon and change them to the corrected coordinates and it’ll actually be the corrected coordinates icon and sync with the web and everything. And so then that icon is on the map where the final is and you… Instead of having an additional way point and remembering which of the caches you’ve already solved.

0:08:51.5 CR: Right. And kinda putting you on the spot here, but I’ll put one of my Christmas wishes to, I’d love to be able to change it for some of the other cache types.

0:09:02.1 NJ: I agree.

0:09:03.1 CR: Where I go letterbox, stuff like that.

0:09:04.6 NJ: Like any cache type that has a final coordinate should have that. And it is on my wishlist as well. I have a 200 plus item wishlist from…

0:09:13.8 CR: Oh, you’re a…

0:09:13.9 NJ: Me and players and lackeys that have come to me. It is very, very hard to prioritize and very painful.

0:09:20.6 CR: Over 200.

0:09:21.6 NJ: Yeah, I can send you a link to it, [laughter]

0:09:24.9 CR: Yeah. Well that’s just gonna make me sad. [laughter] I’ll be like ” Oh, I wanted that too.” So yeah, someday, hopefully we’ll get those on there.

0:09:33.6 NJ: Working through them.

0:09:35.8 CR: Yeah. So yeah, some stuff there on mystery caches then friends, that’s something that I feel like has been a higher priority in recent years to try to find ways that people can connect with other geocachers via the app.

0:09:50.2 NJ: Yeah. So we released the option to add friends via the app last year, so that’s also fairly new. We always had friends… For a long time had friends on the website. And now from the profile in the app, you can tap that icon of the two little people in the top to add.

0:10:06.6 CR: As we both go to our app.

0:10:09.6 NJ: As we go down to open the friend screen. And so that will give you a list of all your friends and then you will also see any friend requests if you have any. And then on your profile you can expand the header to get to your QR code. And so when you meet someone at an event, they can scan the QR code which allows them to add you as a friend.

0:10:36.1 CR: Yeah. That’s one that Cindy, who we both work with mentioned to me the other day when we were talking and I knew about it at one point. I think I… Did it debut right around the 20th anniversary celebration?

0:10:51.3 NJ: That’s correct, yes.

0:10:51.4 CR: Here in Seattle. Yeah. So I feel like that weekend we were all going around showing our QR codes to everybody and then I…

0:10:55.9 CR: And Signal had a QR code that puts yeah…

0:11:00.7 CR: Q signal had a QR code, and I wonder how many friends, Signal got that weekend. I have to go back and look. But yeah, it’s one of those things that then I kind of forget about it because it’s… I don’t often click on my little avatar there in the app. So I’ll have to remember to do that the next time I go to an event.

0:11:15.7 NJ: And when I meet people at events I will often then look at the will attends because from the lock screen you can tap on someone’s icon to see their profile. And from that you have the add friend button as well.

0:11:32.1 CR: Oh, okay. Yeah. Right.

0:11:33.3 NJ: So You don’t have to scan someone’s code. There’s multiple ways to add a friend.

0:11:35.0 CR: Sure. Yeah. There you go. Speaking of event caches, adding them to a calendar, that’s actually something that I only… I’m kind of ashamed to say, recently started doing. And again, kind of just one of those little things that makes a big difference.

0:11:52.1 NJ: Yeah. And we actually had an improvement that I don’t think we had release notes about because it was such a small thing. The add to calendar link in the app used to create a full day event in your calendar, and so then you still had to go to the GC code and copy it over and open the app or whatever to see when the event was actually at. But now when you tap add to calendar, it will actually create the event for the duration that the event is scheduled.

0:12:15.9 CR: Yeah. That’s great. What else about friends that comes to mind for you?

0:12:21.7 NJ: Yeah, all my friends who are geocachers are also my friends in the Geocaching app, because when I go geocaching and I am stumped and don’t know where to look, I always check the activity screen and we can see all logs, but you can also specifically see your friend’s logs and I…

0:12:41.2 CR: Very helpful if you’re looking for that phone a friend situation. Right?

0:12:44.0 NJ: And I also know which of my friends have more helpful logs or like hide little hints like you know the classic I was stumped at this location.

0:12:56.9 CR: Ah, yes.

0:12:57.0 NJ: Or there was something about nuts and bolts at a recent cache where… And the cache was a little bolt.

0:13:02.4 CR: Right.

0:13:06.7 NJ: And there was like a word joke in the log that helped me figure out what it was.

0:13:11.3 CR: We were laughing during a recent. I did a podcast interview with Ari and Jessica about the new logging flow and they expanded the number of characters that were possible for a log, which Ari loves because he types these gargantuan logs. And I hate because I have to scroll past those logs to get to ones that have some sort of a little hint, a little nugget that I can like stumped or whatever that might help me find the cache. So we were laughing about that.

0:13:42.2 NJ: Yeah. Another thing I really like is when you look at someone else’s profile, you can see their heights. So from someone else’s profile.

0:13:51.1 CR: Again, as we both go to the app.

0:13:54.6 NJ: Oh yeah. What’s the flow again.

0:13:55.3 CR: I wish we had video of this [laughter] You could see us just both looking away from each other as we’re trying to go to a cache and look at the logs, look at the activity. Okay, now I’m going to a person and there’s their heights.

0:14:06.6 NJ: There’s their heights. So yeah. So the finds and favorite points, line items, you can’t tap them. And you used to not be able to tap the heights line item, but now you can and you see a list of all of the active heights. And so I love seeing what my friends hit. I’m much more aware now what my friends have hidden than before. ‘Cause it was harder to see a list of someone else’s heights. Especially on the mobile when on the mobile, when on the phone. But also when I’m in an area where I might not know all the caches and hiders and I find a cool cache I can now see there’s another cool cache from the same CO nearby. That is one of my favorite features. You can also, another profile related cool feature we have is you can see your own finds list. So you can’t see other people’s finds, but you can see your own. And so if I wanted to show you the cache with the nuts and bolts, I can actually now find it in my finds list because I recently logged it. And so I can quickly show you, “oh, I was out. Here’s the cool cache I found.”

0:15:02.9 CR: Right. Well this is wild. I’m gonna… Again, I’m kind of, I feel a little embarrassed to say this, but I really haven’t looked at my friend’s hides via the app and it’s really kind of cool now I’m just kind of scrolling through the list of my friends and I was like “wow, I didn’t know that they owned a couple of, well, for instance, a couple of adventure… It shows of your own adventures too.” So, wow. Now I’ve.

0:15:34.0 NJ: And we just talked about Ari, when this feature came out, I looked at, because A, his geocache name states was ACs on top. So I looked at his heights and I realized he had a hide that was in walking distance from my house, [laughter]

0:15:46.1 CR: Oh, wow. I’m seeing he has two. He has one in DC in District Columbia. ‘Cause his family lives out there, so.

0:15:56.5 NJ: Yeah. And his puzzle caches are all kind of shout out to Ari.

0:16:00.5 CR: Yes. Shout out to Ari. Well, gosh, now I know what I’m doing tonight. I’ll just go through the list and play around looking at everybody’s hides. So yeah, there we go. You’ve added another thing for me to check out. And again, we kind of went over it pretty quick, but I really do like being able to look at which of my friends have logged a cache. Because again, it’s so great to be able to say, “okay, I can reach out to that person if I’m having trouble.” And it’s just so easy right there as you’re out in the field. So anything else with…

0:16:31.6 NJ: Well, friends related, adjacent lists when you plan on outing together the fortnight caches, for example, I’ll create a list and then I’ll share it with the friend that I wanna go caching with. And then they can make a copy from the website, but that all syncs with the app. So they will have the list that I created as a copy in their list tab as well.

0:16:50.8 CR: I’m not sure if we’re allowed to talk about stuff. We’re working on other stuff. I can say that. Right?

0:16:56.7 NJ: We are working on other stuff.

0:16:58.4 CR: I can’t be specific. I’m not gonna… Don’t worry, I’m not gonna spill any beans. I’m just saying we’re working on…

0:17:04.2 NJ: And I wish we had a video.

0:17:05.9 CR: We’re working on other stuff… I just, oh, I wanna say something. And I can’t say it. And I’m not going to. I’m not gonna say it.

0:17:11.6 NJ: But there’s cool stuff coming.

0:17:11.8 CR: There’s cool stuff coming. Thank you. I’m allowed to say that, right?

0:17:15.4 NJ: Yeah.

0:17:16.3 CR: You can say that?

0:17:19.4 NJ: You can always say that.

0:17:19.5 CR: It’s vague, but no, there is cool stuff coming and yeah, it’s great to be sharing your list with friends on the web and then making copies in the app. That’s great.

0:17:32.8 NJ: And then of course you can download a list for offline. I really like that feature as well, especially if I travel internationally and I’m not sure if my plan will allow me to access Connectivity.

0:17:42.8 CR: Yeah. And I still run into people that are very experienced that didn’t know you could do that so much or maybe they do most of their caching with the GPS. And they just haven’t used the app as much. And then they’ll say, Hey, is it possible to do this? Of course. Yeah. Of course. You’ve been able to do that for a long time. So I’m like you though. Well, if I’m traveling or if I’m gonna be here in Seattle, we have the mountains not too far away and you lose cell coverage. Pretty commonly out there. So having the list downloaded is really huge.

0:18:13.7 NJ: Yeah. Agreed.

0:18:17.8 CR: We wanna talk about experimental features. That’s maybe one of my favorite things about the app. And that’s a premium feature. We should mention that.

0:18:28.4 NJ: Yeah. Premium members get access to these experimental features. They’re different on iOS and Android for various reasons. Currently iOS has a couple of more and I know you are on iOS.

0:18:36.9 CR: Yeah. So, on iOS I have show favorite points on logs. I have ads/remove favorite points, view, select trackables in AR and caches with trackables. So those are the things that premium members have access to in iOS on experimental features. And before we get into talking specifically about these things, we wanna mention that, make sure that you have to go to your profile, your settings in the app, and then click on experimental features and turn on, toggle the ones that you want. And if for some reason you log out and then when you log back in, you gotta do it again. So, that’s a stumbling block for me sometimes is, sometimes I’ll either purposely log out or I’ll just be logged out for some weird reason and then I just forget to go into those experimental features and to… ‘Cause I do like seeing favorite points on logs in particular. That’s probably the one that I like the most out of what’s on there right now. And so I gotta remember to turn it back on again. So those are the things with iOS and then what do you have there on Android?

0:19:51.7 NJ: On Android we have filter for caches with trackables. So it’s an additional filter that you can turn on and MT DT grid search and which is also an additional filter, but you also see it on the statistics screen where you can… If you have not filled your grid yet. So for you these features would not be helpful Chris. There’s 80-150 loops. So how many do you have right now?

0:20:15.1 CR: It’s still a great feature.

0:20:16.8 NJ: It’s still a great feature. That one actually motivated me to fill my D/T grid because, I don’t know if you remember, but before we had that feature, I found it really difficult to figure out which caches I needed. And I reached out to you and you created multiple lists.

0:20:31.4 CR: I did.

0:20:32.0 NJ: For me to find, missing D/T grids, but with this feature I have filled my D/T grid finally.

0:20:38.0 CR: Wow. I don’t know if I knew that. When did that happen?

0:20:45.0 NJ: Oh. A while ago.

0:20:45.1 CR: Wow.

0:20:45.0 NJ: Over a year ago.

0:20:45.1 CR: Oh. Okay. Now time is, was there a party or anything or did it just kind of pass by.

0:20:48.8 NJ: It was on my HQ 20 celebration card.

0:20:51.5 CR: Oh yeah. When we put like our favorite geocaching.

0:20:58.4 NJ: Achievement. Yeah.

0:20:58.4 CR: Okay. And so I think we’ve probably done an episode about experimental features in the past, but it’s been a long time ago. So just to kind of refresh people’s memory. How would you describe what experimental features are? How do they get in there? How do they graduate out of experimental features? Just a brief overview of how the whole section, what that’s about?

0:21:20.8 NJ: Yeah, with experimental features. We have a very different process. So some of these are developed kind of very fast, so there’s not as rigorous, what I would say, like control. So they might not be fully fleshed out, they might not be working like 100%, not all the edge cases are covered. And so because of this kind of very fast process, the two platforms are not in the same track. So there’s a little bit of flexibility as well for developers to work on one thing more than another. And so that’s kind of how the two platforms get out of sync. But because we wanna sometimes move fast and put out cool things, but we value having the platforms be in alignment with experimental features. This was kind of the space that we created to put in things in front of premium members before they are ready to get out into the world.

0:22:07.5 NJ: And sometimes they don’t get out into the world. So some features in the experimental features menu might not be used very often or they end up not actually solving a problem. And so we do monitor the data, but once we decide that it is ready to graduate and so the profile, for example, that did start out as an experimental feature when they graduate to the full app, so to say, then we make sure that the platforms are aligned and that everything works and all the edge cases and offline stays and everything is fully functioning.

0:22:41.1 CR: Okay. So you generally want to have, like you were saying, both apps be consistent. And so in order for a feature to move on, it has to be ready to move on in both Android and iOS?

0:22:53.9 NJ: Yeah, so for the most part we want the apps to be in parity. But for example iOS has Siri and Android doesn’t. So if we ever did something with Siri, we would not be able to have the apps in parity.

0:23:03.5 CR: Well, we have listed a lot of things for people to check out and for me to check out. I think I’ve caught myself with at least a handful of different features that I need to. And like I said, I’ll spend the rest of today looking through my friend’s hides, their list of hides via the app. I don’t know. Do you think we covered?

0:23:24.4 NJ: Yeah.

0:23:24.9 CR: We covered a lot, didn’t we?

0:23:27.1 NJ: I would be interested if any of the listeners have favorite features that we didn’t list.

0:23:30.7 CR: Sure. Yeah. Put those in the comments there on the podcast page or when we release this on social media. I feel like I just like to keep talking. We haven’t seen each other in a while. [laughter], anything else you want to cover while we’re here? Okay. Well, in the meantime…

0:23:50.1 NJ: In the meantime.

0:23:50.5 CR: This was great and it’s always fun to hear what the mobile team is up to. I see they’re all meeting together. Most of you I think are together this week here at HQ.

0:24:02.5 NJ: Yeah we’re all in the office.

0:24:02.6 CR: Yeah. And hopefully, I’m sure planning some exciting stuff for the coming months and into 2024. And so it’ll be fun to see what comes out.

0:24:11.9 NJ: Yeah. I’m looking forward to be back and talking about the cool stuff that’s coming.

0:24:16.6 CR: Ooh, the cliffhanger. I love it. She’s shaking her head [laughter], but she already said it. We’re gonna hold her to it. All right. Thank you Nicole.

0:24:25.5 NJ: Thanks Chris.

0:24:25.5 CR: That was Nicole, the product manager for HQ’s mobile team. Open up the official Geocaching app and check out some of the stuff that we talked about. And like Nicole said, if there are features that you especially like tell us about it in the comments section of the podcast page. And if there’s something you would like us to cover on our podcast, send an email to podcast@geocaching.com. Until then, from me and Nicole and all the lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

Inside Geocaching HQ transcript (episode 37): Daniel Gruici

[music]

00:14 Chris Ronan: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast about the goings-on at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. My name is Chris Ronan. My username is Rock Chalk. I am one of the 80 or so lackeys who works at HQ in Seattle. And of course, these days we are working remotely now for about two months, all of the lackeys are, so this is more of a podcast about HQ rather than being from HQ. But today, it is my pleasure to talk with Daniel Gruici, who is the Mobile Engineering Lead at HQ. He has had some interesting positions before he came here, and has had some interesting role since he has been at HQ. So we enjoyed talking about those things. So let’s get right to it. Me and Daniel Gruici.

[music]

01:15 CR: Daniel, thank you for taking some time out and talking about any number of… You don’t know what we’re gonna talk about today, it’s wide open. So thank you for taking the leap with me.

01:26 Daniel Gruici: Hey, thanks for having me, I’m really excited to be here.

01:29 CR: So, mobile engineering lead, let’s start with that. What does that mean? How would you describe what you do to a stranger?

01:37 DG: So, it’s evolved since I started, but my main thing is making sure everybody on the team feels like they’re growing, removing roadblocks that they may have, that I can help solve, and trying to be as much of a subject matter expert as I can for both the platforms. But my main thing and the thing that I enjoy the most is just making sure everybody feels like they’re growing and moving forward in their careers.

02:03 CR: What originally brought you to HQ? Because I know this is one of a few roles that you’ve had here. What was that that first brought you to HQ?

02:11 DG: So, back when I was in Arizona, I was looking for leadership positions. It’s something I’ve kind of fallen into and enjoyed each time that I’ve been anywhere, actually. And the job pool in Arizona was looking for more development, they were looking for more people who wanted to do cross-platform solutions and things like that, and I’m not extremely interested in it, it’s still a emerging market down there, so different problems that caused me to look outside.

02:41 DG: My wife actually suggested, “Hey, if we’re looking outside, why not Washington?” I was like, “Okay.” And then when I found that Geocaching was hiring, I also found out that D-Rux, one of my friends that I met in college, was working there. I was like, “Well, alright.” So I reached out and I’m like, “Tell me about working there,” and he’s like, “It’s great working here.” “Well, that seals it. Okay.” [chuckle] So, applied, fun fact, I believe, LinkedIn and the parent company for Victoria’s Secret, those are the three in the running. And then as soon as I got the offer, which came real quick and I was so stoked, I was like, “Yeah, no, we’re done, we’re going to Washington. We’re going to Geocaching, it’s gonna be great.”

03:24 CR: That is quite a trio of contenders for your services, quite a range of offerings there. And I would think HQ was probably by far the smallest of those three; those other two are pretty well-known international conglomerates. What was it about HQ that really appealed to you?

03:47 DG: The one who sold me on it the most was actually our previous product owner, Ben, who I’m sure everybody knows. He and I had a really good conversation about how the product team flow works and what he looks for and what he was interested in and how we put our work product together, and that was something I was really looking for, because it’s very difficult to find somebody who both cares about your customer, and then also brings that all the way through to the developers, so that we feel the same way and then moves the story through so that we can get work done. And then when I got to do my in-person interview, the other Android developers were very welcoming. I somehow impressed them as well ’cause they’re talented folks. And all of us had just… It felt like a perfect fit, when I finally got to be on site, even though I came in my shirt and tie, as I do…

[laughter]

04:46 DG: Don’t worry, the tie had geometry proofs, it was totally legit and very casual. [laughter] Even with that, I still felt like… It still felt like I’d fit in. It felt like I could be an asset for the team, and that was the feedback I got too. It was actually something really nice was them saying, “The first person that came in here, he didn’t just stomp in and say ‘Well, this is how we can fix this, and this is what we could do here, and this would… ‘ The first things out of your mouth were, ‘Oh, well, how do I fit in with the team? How do I fit in with Geocaching? What do I do to make it so that I’m successful at Geocaching and how things are going?'” That sold me to them, and it sold Geocaching to me. So, it was no-brainer once I finally got the on-site done and got the offer. [chuckle]

05:30 CR: You mentioned being in Arizona at the time, what kind of things had you done before you came to HQ?

05:37 DG: So, I worked with American Express for a couple of years, twice actually, and that’s a funny story, if we wanna get into that. They thought I was a 10-year veteran at AmEx when I had hit my fourth year because, worked for them in 2006, worked for them in 2016, that’s 10 years, yeah, so… [chuckle]

05:55 CR: I hope there was some extra vacation that you got for that or something.

05:58 DG: There was an insane amount of vacation. I also got this… On my desk at work, there is a black slate plaque that sits there, and it’s the heaviest thing on there. It’s got the Centurion card on it, on the back it says, “Thanks Daniel for 10 years of loyal experience and time with us at American Express.” I was like… I even reached out, “This is a… I haven’t worked here for 10 years.” I know it’s been 10 years’ total, ’cause I used to be a fraud analyst for them, and they’re like, “No, no, no, it’s fine.” “Okay, cool. Great.”

06:28 CR: Wow.

06:29 DG: 10 years, alright. [chuckle]

06:31 CR: That’s like a scene out of Office Space or something.

06:33 DG: Yeah, [chuckle] yeah, “Congratulations,” “Oh no, where did they find out? When do I get in trouble?” But for them, I was kind of doing lead work and kind of doing senior work for Android for them. It was a kind of a new team getting put together for business customers. And so that’s where I started getting further and further and just like, “Yeah, I wanna get into the senior work, I wanna get into the lead work.” Before that, I worked for Allstate, and that was a trip. That was working on a very strange system that has to do with the Good Hands Rescue, I think is the name of the app now, but I was in on that at a very interesting time. And before that, I worked for GoDaddy, and I was a part of the search team. So as soon as you type search… You search for any website to find out if you could get it or not, that was when I started.

07:29 CR: Oh, wow.

07:30 DG: I’m sure there’s still things in there that I wrote that are still in that search path, and I know for sure they’re still using… I created an automator for top-level domains. They all had the same kind of webpage and stuff, but we kept writing them every time, and I know for sure they’re still using that, which is a terribly hacky C# application. Yeah. And even before that, there was ASU, that’s how I learned how to do Android. I said I could learn it in a month and they believed me. And I joined the Teachers College and help them build educational apps, and hired on a bunch of people, and did a bunch of very interesting stuff for both Android and iOS, and that was… Oh gosh, that was like eight years ago now. [chuckle]

08:10 CR: Wow, that’s a lot of interesting stuff. So you show up at HQ… Maybe just talk a little bit about the difference working in a place like HQ as opposed to… You just mentioned a lot of, what I assume, are very big companies with very large staffs, and then you come to HQ where more of a bootstrap organization, around 80 people altogether. I would assume things work differently here as opposed to where you have been, but I don’t know, you tell me.

08:43 DG: For sure. One of the nice advantages is being able to walk across the hall and say, “Hey friends, I need help with the database thing, I need help with an API thing.” And everyone’s like, “Oh, hey, Daniel.” They know my name and my face like right away, [chuckle] and everybody is willing to help. When you’re in… When you start getting into those larger orgs, it can get very difficult to get… They can get difficult to put things through because everybody’s a separate project, everyone’s a separate team, and that has its advantages for an organization that large, like imagine for American Express trying to get into just a data system for testable data, that’s a whole to-do, that’s a project plan, that’s your project number going through, you speak with all these people, and then it’s like, “Okay, in two weeks, we might have data for you, as long as all the other project things kinda happen.”

09:35 DG: And being siloed off like that, again, I don’t get the same kind of advantage, like I don’t have somebody that’s just writing back and stuff and helping me out with that. And it was definitely a very strange experience for me having worked in basically siloed areas the entire time for most of my professional career. [chuckle] The only thing that was this bootstrap is ASU. So back when I worked for the university, it was a very similar feel, like there was just the group of developers, and it was pretty much us making sure that these apps were put together, that we did all the backend work, we did all that. So it’s been a lot of fun to go back to that more bootstrap-y feel, ’cause it feels like a lot of things get done faster and it’s interesting to see just the result of us all being able to work together so quickly.

10:27 CR: We were talking before we started recording about projects that you’ve worked on and certainly anybody that has used the apps, the official geocaching apps, has seen your work, but so much of that is kind of, I guess, I wanna say behind the scenes. There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t just obvious when you look at it. But we were talking about the navigation project, that was a really big deal, and certainly something that everybody is familiar with if you’re using that app.

10:58 DG: Yeah, that was a huge deal. It’s one of the harder pieces to work on with mobile ’cause we’re trying to deal with the accelerometer and the compass and the gyroscope, and it’s all these onboard components, and then performing a bunch of matrix multiplication and otherwise, to get your bearing and get to where the phone is pointing. And something just as simple as that took a very long time. It was a very involved project and very, very interesting. It was fun to see and test when we would have users kind of mess around with it, and aim their phones towards that the orange line everybody knows that goes from view to the cache and see it’s like, “Oh, it’s in that direction.” So it was really fulfilling to be like, “Oh cool, look at it go.” So it was a huge project. It was a lot of interesting fun, and I mean, interesting in the hard way, not interesting in like, “Yeah, I’d do this again for sure.” ‘Cause hardware is an interesting monster on the mobile platform. But yeah, it was a big change in the way that users got to caches and it was a big change in the way that just the entire flow of the app kind of went. So it was a very interesting project.

12:14 CR: Now, you’re the mobile engineering lead, what… Let’s talk about the mobile team, what kind of expertises come together to make up a mobile team, and how many people are we talking about? And we don’t have to be exhaustive about it necessarily, but there’s a lot of different kinds of abilities that make up a team like that, isn’t there?

13:32 DG: Yeah, it’s easy context. There’s 11 of us total that are just mobile. And that doesn’t mean the support folks like… So our API teams, they’re working on both the website APIs and the ones that feed the mobile app. So it could be anyone that’s doing backend work and helping us out. The people who are just strictly mobile, and this is for the Geocaching project, so this doesn’t include the Adventures project, there’s 11 of us there. So three and three for Android iOS, we have our QA lead, we have our product designer, product owner, and then our project manager as well. And yeah, the expertise just… It’s nice being in this kind of like… It’s almost like a smaller feature team like targeting the core app, and very diverse and awesome, but all needed. [chuckle]

13:33 DG: Between the two teams, like for the iOS team and the Android team, we do have a senior developer and they’re kind of like our technical lean-to. They’re the ones that are going out there and saying it’s like, “Oh, Android’s introduced something new.” “Oh, iOS 25 is coming out. Well, this is what we need to be aware of, and this is the new features they’ve added.” And then all of us working together and learning to just, “What can we use to make the app better?” And that’s basically the goal of the entire team. “What do we do so that this app does better? What do we do so you get to the geocache? What do we do so that your experience is fun? How do we keep the fun going?” [chuckle]

14:08 CR: You know, it’s funny, as you were talking just now, I was thinking about the number of times that I’ll see that my laptop needs a system update or I’ve got apps that need an update, and it’s kind of… Maybe it’s annoying. There’s that moment where I have to, “Oh great, I gotta wait for this thing to update or whatever.” But your team’s [chuckle] existence sometimes revolves around keeping up with the number of different operating system updates on Android or iOS or what have you. And I would imagine there’s a lot of them that me, as the end user, I never know that those things necessarily even happen. They’re so behind the scenes. But you guys have to be totally on top of all that stuff. I think that would drive me crazy. [laughter]

14:54 DG: It’s a weird world. So I grew up with computers, and I’ve been there when… I remember when Windows 95 got released, and you got the picture of a dude holding that above his head, and that’s done work. I get… There’s such a… Even with the headache that it is like keeping up with this stuff, I still get this extreme luxury of like, “Yeah, well, okay, this version… Oh okay, this version’s got something weird. Android introduced something new. Alright, I gotta fix this.” I can fix that in a day as opposed to the rollout of like, “I gotta get every CD manufacturer in Asia running so that I can have enough of these CDs to send out.” It’s wild, and I think that’s what keeps me humble [chuckle] about keeping up with this, it’s like, “Well, we could be releasing this stuff on CD-ROM.” [laughter]

15:45 CR: Oh my gosh, wow. That’s a memory you just brought back. [chuckle]

15:50 DG: Oh man. Yeah.

15:51 CR: Getting those big old six-inch thick boxes that just had like 12 CD-ROMs in them that you had to… [laughter]

16:00 DG: Yeah, “I put in number two of 25.”

16:02 CR: Right, oh my gosh.

16:04 DG: Alright. [laughter]

16:06 CR: Oh my gosh, I had totally forgotten about that. I’m gonna have nightmares.

16:10 DG: I know. It’s a weird world we live in. [laughter] This doesn’t date me too much, but I remember the first computer… My dad was adamant that we had a computer in our household, and we got a Packard Bell, and it connected to the internet, and we thought that was the coolest thing ever. And it took floppy disks and ran this massive dot matrix printer for putting out invoices. [laughter] And then we got an IBM 386 for the house, ’cause that was for the job, that was for his business. And I still remember putting in floppy 205 in, still remember navigating through DOS and doing all that stuff. So it’s like…

16:47 CR: Wow.

16:48 DG: I think I get to be lucky in that sense. Like developers of the future, we’ll see if they even… Like if they have that kind of like cut moment there, but it’s like, “I’m not making floppies, I’m not trying to push over-the-year updates for like an app but we’re good, I’ll handle it. Cool. You wanna change the way the UI works with Android? Great, sure, I’ll figure it out. I’ll push out an update, it’ll be okay.” [laughter]

17:11 CR: So when you got to HQ, how much did you know about Geocaching when you first got here?

17:16 DG: All I knew was that you guys were great. [laughter]. D-Rux was really… He talked really highly of the company. And I had not realized that this existed. And it was interesting too ’cause my interview was in mid-July, and in Arizona, it was 115 degrees out. So I was going to go look for one before I flew out, but then didn’t want to deal with the sun as most Arizonans don’t. [laughter] So if you look, my first find’s actually the HQ cache. ‘Cause I came in and was able to do that before my interview started and found it, and then continued to find more as I went. So yeah, I was completely unaware coming in. [chuckle]

18:01 CR: Well you’ve really gotten onboard with it though. I know you’ve been very engaged, just with getting to know the game and the community. What have you found that you enjoy most about geocaching as you’ve been involved with it longer?

18:18 DG: My, honestly, favorite thing is as soon as you’re with a group of geocachers, you’re all friends. Your’re friends right away. And I know that kinda happens in other hobbies where it’s like, “Oh yeah, we both play guitar. That’s cool.” But you don’t get that camaraderie right away. It’s like, “Oh we’re all on an adventure together. We’re great friends right now. This is… ” The conversations flow, we talk about finding geocaches, we talk about our wives, we talk about families, we talk about other hobbies we have, but it’s… You don’t get that instant into the… I guess, it’s like an instant into the party. It’s like, “Oh you geocache too? Welcome to the party, I’m glad you’re here.” And that is the feeling you’ll get at any of the events you go to, or when you find another geocacher and start talking about it.

19:10 DG: I remember I was in Leavenworth, and I was at a bar, and one of the staff there had coordinates tattooed on their arm. And I was like “Oh, home coordinates?” And they’re like, “Yeah, sort of.” I’m like, “Oh, like geocaching.” “I use the geocache, and that’s kind of why I had the idea, that’s why… ” And it was just… And then there was a conversation for half an hour about geocaches around Leavenworth. And it’s that easy, and it’s the best part about the community.

19:39 CR: And for people that might not know, that’s Leavenworth, Washington. There are… I’m from Kansas, there’s a Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m sure there’s probably other Leavenworths. But Leavenworth, Washington, a very idyllic, Bavarian-theme town. And a lot of good geocaches around there.

19:55 DG: Yeah.

19:56 CR: We’ve been doing a thing where we ask people a few, I don’t know, just kinda get to know you questions. So you’ve already answered a couple of them as far as how would you describe your job and what do you like about Geocaching? So we’ll go through a couple of the other ones here. What is your favorite movie?

20:16 DG: Amadeus. One, it’s shot beautifully. Two, I like the idea of having this very, very surly and angry man in Salieri, who’s another composer at the time. Amadeus Mozart, and Salieri is portrayed as this other composer in the same court and he sees this idiot that’s there and then finds out this idiot is a musical genius, and how much hate that he has for him but how much respect that he has. Because Salieri has worked so hard. And what that respect kind of turns into, as the movie goes along, I just, it’s one of those ones that I can watch a million times. I have the soundtrack on vinyl because they did like a 30th anniversary of Amadeus on vinyl. It’s classical music on vinyl ’cause it’s all, that was all what was in the movie, but it’s just like that’s how much I love this movie. It’s like, “Oh yeah, Amadeus merchandise, didn’t think that would exist. But yeah, I’m on board, I’m a fan.”

21:20 CR: And kind of what dates me is when I think of Amadeus is I think of Rock Me Amadeus.

21:25 DG: Exactly, Falco.

21:27 CR: Yeah, Falco, man. I was on a trip recently on a, I guess it wasn’t all that recently, because it was before all the COVID stuff, but we had satellite radio in our rental car and of course, listened to the ’80s channel. And yeah, Rock Me Amadeus came on about once every three or four hours, and it was… The car was jamming, man.

[laughter]

21:46 DG: It’s a great tune.

21:47 CR: I need to go back and watch that movie though. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that one. So your favorite hobby, what is that?

21:55 DG: Still trying to figure that out. I got a lot of hobbies. I don’t have the same thing at my bookcase ’cause there’s just a bunch of brands and stuff on there. There’s so many things. A big one and one that I got hyped about because we did a partnership with is Magic: The Gathering. That was a huge magic player for… Gosh, well, it’s almost 20 years I’ve been playing Magic.

22:18 CR: Wow.

22:19 DG: Now, since ’93. So, not a difficult thing to do for 20 years, but… Yeah, huge amount of collection, much to my wife’s chagrin, she’s… There are cards all over the house, and…

22:31 CR: Yeah, that must’ve been pretty cool when that trackable promotion came out for someone like yourself, that has such a history with that game.

22:39 DG: Oh yeah, I actually, I think it’s two years ago now, they had the Grand Prix Seattle, so big, because Wizard of the Coast is in Washington. So Seattle, Washington Grand Prix, big time thing. I actually snagged some of them to start selling some other players on Geocaching, and be like, “Hey, check out this game, we’re partnering with them. It’s another cool game.” So it was very… So you could tell I’m a little bit into both games, just a little bit.

23:05 CR: That’s awesome. That’s great.

23:06 DG: Get more people on board.

23:09 CR: What is your favorite place to visit?

23:13 DG: Recently, it became Death Valley. I went on a trip with a bunch of other Lackeys to go and find all of the EarthCaches that are out there. And it was… One, I’m from Arizona and that’s… If you were to ask the one thing I missed, it’s the heat from there, which makes me weird. But there’s another… There’s a thing about it where it’s like this very predictable weather in a desert like that. And Death Valley was just like, we came in at the right time of year. Everything is just picturesque and beautiful. And it reminded me a lot of what I missed of some of the parts in Arizona, not the metropolitan Arizona, but I’d go out to Carefree, and everybody goes to the Sedona and stuff like that, but that’s all they’re out in Death Valley. It was just a wonderfully calm place and that was, it’s what I enjoyed the most.

24:06 CR: I had an interesting Geocaching experience with Death Valley as well. We were… My wife and I visited Las Vegas several years ago, and while we were there, I told her, I said I’d really like to go to Death Valley because I know there’s some virtuals and EarthCaches and things like that. And she kinda rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, Geocaching, you’re just… What would I wanna see in Death Valley?” And I said, “Just trust me. Let’s give it a shot.” Man, she was, still to this day talks about how much she loved visiting Death Valley. And so I consider that a huge win for Geocaching.

[laughter]

24:42 DG: Yeah, and what other reason would I have to go out there? It’s like it’s just… I mean, it’s a national park, it’s cool but it’s like, “Oh Geocaching brought me there. Oh wow, this place is great. Wow.”

24:51 CR: Exactly, yeah. How many times have we had that experience? What is your favorite Geocaching memory?

25:01 DG: So another Lackey trip that we did, another group trip we did for Geocaching, went to Arizona, so super excited and we went to go find the oldest geocache in Arizona. It was the right time of year. And I know, right time of year. It’s like, “Hey, just be careful folks. Bushes, snakes. Snakes will be out. Rattlesnakes they’ll be out there.” And I remember watching some folks walk around bushes and clap at them to say like, “Hey snakes.” You know trying to get snakes to, I don’t know, be scared off or leave.

[laughter]

25:34 DG: To my knowledge, I think some rattlesnakes are deaf and they just kind of rely on vibration. So, clapping at them is just gonna make them mad. But it was like, “Yeah, if it makes you feel safe [chuckle] just don’t go in the bushes, okay?” Like stick around to the desire trails that are out here that’ll lead us. [chuckle] Just be careful. But yeah, seeing a bunch of folks clapping around, “Snakes, snakes, no, snakes.” It was like, “Sure. As long as you feel safe.”

[laughter]

26:06 CR: I know you’ve also gotten to get out and meet some of the community and you went to a mega last year, didn’t you?

26:13 DG: Yes, I went to Wisconsin for the Cache Bash and that was amazing, it was a… That was a great community, I can’t say enough about them because from start to finish… Even the Chamber of Commerce is in on the event and it’s just this big huge thing for the whole, just that whole piece of community right there. And it was well organized and everybody, I’m gonna say everybody was friendly. But I’ve already mentioned before, it’s like, “Yeah, we’re geocachers, we’re all friendly.”

26:47 DG: Everybody was welcoming, “There you go. That’s a good one.” They’re like “Hey, welcome to West Bend, we’re glad you’re here. Go eat at this place, you’ll enjoy it, if you’re looking for food. Here’s all the unique Geocaches that these people have put up for this event specifically.” And it’s like, “This is astounding.”

27:04 CR: That’s awesome.

27:05 DG: Yeah, just a wonderful time.

27:07 CR: Now before we go, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask, I don’t know if we’re gonna see the video of this conversation we are recording it, it may just be audio, but I would be remiss if I didn’t ask, normally at the office you’re wearing a hat. I don’t often see your… Is this hair always under that hat or is this pandemic hair?

27:29 DG: Little of both. Personal thing, I actually had psoriasis and it gets really bad on my scalp and what my hat was for was to keep my head safe and keep my hair short, so that I could take care of it really easily. I got on some new stuff and it has calmed the way the heck down and now my hair could be free again and this is just what it does. So, I showered this morning and then with hair, do what you will and it’s like, “Okay.” And then it does this. It stays up this high, it does all these things just on its own, and it’s actually a lot longer too. My headphones are covering up that there’s just a ton of it in the back, and this is what it does, and if we do the video and you really want something silly, I can show you a picture of me when I was 16, the first time I grew my hair long and you see this very skinny adolescent version of Daniel with hair past his shoulders.

28:27 CR: Oh my gosh, wow.

28:29 DG: Yeah, it’s wild. We’ll see if it keeps growing out. It’s a little bit pandemic hair, a little bit, see what happens if I… Now, I can grow my hair again just ’cause of the new medication I’m on, but yeah you’re right, it used to be hats every day.

28:45 CR: Well, if nothing else, we’ll do a screenshot and we’ll make sure it’s on the podcast page so people can, just coming from where I am, everybody knows what I look like. Kudos, hats off to you. This is very impressive.

[laughter]

29:00 DG: It wants to be a pompadour, never understood why.

29:02 CR: And I hope it continues once we’re back in the office, I think we’d all love to be able to see this every so often. [laughter] How are you doing otherwise? I’ve tried to ask everybody as we’ve done these conversations, just kinda how work is going and just life is going as we’re all making our adjustments here?

29:25 DG: Oh, it’s going really good. I have a good enough home office setup. So, working and getting all that is, it’s nice. I’m able to section that away from the rest of the house, so it doesn’t feel like I just work in the place I live. So that’s very helpful. Definitely a plus if you’re remote working friends. Work is going really well. Coming in the position for the mobile lead thing is kinda new but it’s also all the strengths that I have and I really enjoy that I get to flex all of those and work with the team and the team’s enthusiastic and doing great, which means I’m doing great so that’s… Everything is going quite well.

30:08 CR: Oh that’s great to hear and this has been a lot of fun. I’ve enjoyed hearing more about what you do, and I’m sure folks that met you at the event last year hope to see you again out there, and then hopefully folks in other areas get a chance to meet you down the line as well.

30:26 DG: Oh yeah. Every time we do one of those big trips, we try and do an event. So, if you’re ever seeing like a Lackeys on tour thing, I’m probably there. I’ve been to as many of them as I can, so keep an eye out for me there.

[music]

30:42 CR: So there you have it, that’s Daniel Gruici, the Mobile Engineering Lead at Geocaching HQ. If you have something you would like to hear us talk about on the podcast, you can send us an email. Our address is podcast@geocaching.com that is podcast@geocaching.com. We really love hearing your feedback and your suggestions, and if there’s something you would like to hear us cover, we’ll try to make that happen. Until next time, from me and from Daniel and all the Lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

Episode 37: Daniel Gruici

If you have used the official Geocaching® apps, then you’re familiar with Daniel Gruici’s work. He’s the Mobile Engineering Lead at Geocaching HQ. In this episode, learn about how he came to HQ and what goes into his job here.

We recorded this interview remotely, so we apologize if the sound quality is not as crisp as usual.

You can listen to the episode via this page, or on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or Stitcher. If you use an aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, you can access the RSS feed here.

A full transcript is available here.

And here is a bonus picture of Daniel sporting his work-from-home hair!

InsideGeocachingHQ_Podcast
Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Episode 37: Daniel Gruici
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Episode 17: Geocaching®app update

In this episode, senior product manager Ben Hewitt gives us the rundown of what’s new in this week’s big Geocaching app update.

You can listen to the episode via this page, or on iTunes or Google Play. If you use an aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, you can access the RSS feed here.

A full transcript is available here.

InsideGeocachingHQ_Podcast
Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Episode 17: Geocaching®app update



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