Tag: podcast

Episode 31: Jen Smith, Front End Developer Lead

Jen Smith began her Geocaching HQ career as an intern more than 13 years ago. Since then, she has worked on a lot of big projects – from Wherigo to the new Adventure Lab app. In this episode, we hear about what it means to be a Front End Developer Lead at HQ.

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 here.

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Episode 31: Jen Smith, Front End Developer Lead
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/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 31): Jen Smith, Front End Developer Lead

00:14 Chris: Hey, everyone. This is Inside Geocaching HQ from Seattle. I am Chris, my Geocaching username is Rock Chalk, I am one of the lackeys here at Geocaching HQ and we thank you for listening to our podcast. Our episodes are often focused on specific projects or issues but every so often we just check in with one of my fellow lackeys to ask them about their jobs and that is what we are doing today. I am chatting with Jen Smith who is a Front End Developer Lead. I’m always asking for podcast ideas and a few people have asked to hear about Wherigo. Well, Jen was very involved with creating Wherigo. So for the people who have asked to hear about that you will enjoy this conversation and you will enjoy hearing about all the other cool stuff that she is working on today. So here is me and Jen Smith, enjoy.

[music]

01:22 Chris: And then I gotta figure out I should write down how I wanna start these things. I never know.

01:25 Jen Smith: Yeah, you should have your own schtick.

01:27 Chris: I should.

01:28 JS: Like an intro and an ending. [chuckle]

01:32 Chris: Yeah, I should do one of those like a talk show host does. But yeah, I’m not that professional about it, I guess.

[laughter]

01:43 Chris: Alright, I think I’m ready. Well, Jen, thank you for being on the podcast, you’re one of the longer tenured lackeys here at Geocaching HQ. How many years has it been for you now? 

01:55 JS: It’s been a lot of years, it’s 13 and a half. My 14th anniversary will be next July.

02:01 Chris: And you were talking, before we started here, about how many of the different offices you’ve been… I think you said maybe this is your fourth? 

02:07 JS: Yeah, four offices. I think that the company’s only been in five. So, I came into the first, I think what was the first official office and it was a tiny… Basically, just a couple of rooms above an art studio in downtown Seattle which is really fun. But, yeah, there’s been that one, there was Riverton, actually Downtown, Belltown, 5th Ave and then we’ve been in Fremonts in the Fremont neighborhood ever since, across the street from where we are now. And then Google took that over and so we moved into the current office.

02:35 Chris: Had you heard of Geocaching before you started? What was it? We said 14 years ago. [chuckle]

02:40 JS: That was 14 years ago. No, I had not. And it’s funny because I was actually part of the… One of the first interns that they hired, there were a group of four of us. I had just graduated from college and I needed a job and so I was scouring the ads on Craigslist and found an ad for a job doing I think they called it Creative Content Development and having an art degree I thought, “Oh, this sounds like something I should look into.” And it turned out to be for a little project called Wherigo.

03:08 Chris: Well, so you said you have an art degree. So it wasn’t a… You didn’t have a computer background at that? Or an engineering or whatever…

03:17 JS: No, no, my back…

03:18 Chris: It was more art. Yeah. Wow.

03:19 JS: Yeah, my background is in sequential art so essentially comic books, graphic novels, storyboarding, I really wanted to be a graphic novelist. So that’s what I was really focused on when I graduated, then got hired here at Groundspeak and over the course of my years here discovered that I just really loved programming. So I ended up going to school and getting my CS degree while I was working here on Wherigo and then on the web team. The rest is kind of history.

03:44 Chris: Wow, I never knew that, that’s amazing. So, do you still keep up with the stuff that interested you in college then? The art side of it? 

03:53 JS: Not as much anymore. It’s one of those things that I always want to and I always think about it. My partner is a designer and so the two of us do a lot of… We have a lot of art related inside jokes and we’re constantly drawing stupid pictures for each other or thinking about, “Oh, we should open a T-shirt shop or something and sell T-shirts or something.”

04:16 Chris: I would think that having that background though must be very helpful with what you do now because there is that marriage of design and the engineering side of things that goes into creating products, apps and websites and all that stuff, I gotta think that’s really useful for you.

04:33 JS: Yeah, I think it is, it’s incredibly helpful. First of all, so as a little bit of background currently I’m a Front End Developer. I’m the Front End Developer Lead, so I… Actually, I’m working on the adventures project right now, so I’m not involved in the web as much but I do run the weekly team meetings, architecture meetings, and try to make sure that anyone who works in the Front End, so the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the website is supported and is able to do their best work. And it is super helpful when you’re working on the client side because it’s very much you’re responsible for the interactions and the visuals and we have a design team who comes up with the design systems and actually defines what’s our product on the web is supposed to look like and how it’s supposed to behave, and then we’re the ones responsible for implementing it. So you do need to be able to speak that language. So it’s very, very helpful to have that marriage of an art or a design background and then be technical enough to be able to write decent code that works as expected.

05:39 Chris: So you referred to Front End Developer, for people that might not be familiar with the terminology, does that mean there’s a Back End Developer? 

[chuckle]

05:47 JS: Yes, there absolutely is.

05:49 Chris: What is the difference between the two? 

05:51 JS: So, I like cars. So, I’m going to give a car metaphor. Back End Development is the services that you don’t necessarily interact directly with but it’s the data that powers, everything that you see and touch and interact with on the website. And so, front end would be the… It would be the body, the styling, the center console, the dashboard, steering wheel, gear shift, all of that. Anything that you as a user can interact with. That’s what we build, but we need the Back End Developers and then the Full Stack and Middle Tier Developers as well who will split between both of those sometimes, everybody has to work together to build that car.

06:31 Chris: Right, right, and you said you first came here as an intern and then here you are now, 14 Years later, I… I mean, there must have continued to be things that have been compelling for you and interesting and challenging.

06:46 JS: Yeah, it definitely hasn’t been boring. There’s always something new to learn, something new to do, some new problem that needs to be solved, and I’ve actually… I mentioned I started on Wherigo, so I worked on that for a few years and then when we sort of backburnered that project a little bit, I ended up working in the marketing department for a very short period of time, and then I was recruited by who was at the time our lead web designer to work on the web team. And so, I’ve stayed on the web team ever since. So I’ve been able to move around, which I’ve always thought was really cool. It’s… I know a lot of people, or a lot of companies don’t really invest in their employees that much and give them so many opportunities to grow and to gain new skill sets, and to step outside of their comfort zones and do something completely new or change careers. And I’ve been able to do that, so I feel incredibly fortunate. But it’s also been… Yeah, it’s been a blast.

07:39 Chris: Okay, so you mentioned Wherigo a couple of times. That’s a very popular thing that I hear about when people write in and suggest podcast ideas, because it is a part of the game’s history and it’s something that people have just always been interested in. So I wonder if we could talk a little bit about your memories of that project and how it’s… Did you first know about it as an intern? Is it going back that far? 

08:05 JS: That’s what… Yeah, that’s what I was hired to work on. So Wherigo was in the very, very early stages and there was, I think, if I remember correctly, one full-time developer who would built out the builder and the player, so it was… I think it ran on… It was an actual application for your desktop. I think it ran on Windows, it may have been XP, it might have been even earlier than that, I don’t exactly remember, but that was the builder and then the player application was for GPS enabled pocket PCs. So it was a very interesting, very niche platform. Anyway, they had this… We had this application and the company wanted content for it because…

08:45 JS: Well, I mean, how do you know? Is anybody going to even use it? How do you draw them in? And so, they were specifically looking for interns to develop that content. So people who would be the storytellers, creatives, I think, we had a couple of artists, one was a musician, just people who liked telling stories and wanted to explore what it would be like to make games and not necessarily video games, but specifically text-based interactive, like the old text-based RPGs. I’ve never played any of them, but I understand that Jeremy really… Jeremy Irish really liked them. And I think that was the… That might have been the inspiration for Wherigo is to have a location-based text-based RPG platform, which is… It could be really… I mean, was… I think it was… I still think it’s an incredibly cool platform.

09:41 Chris: Right. And what do you remember about… I don’t know. Just kind of, what went into it and the kind of work that you did on it there over the course of at that time.

[chuckle]

09:51 JS: Well, there were four of us that we formed a super user, I guess, and that’s where our J2B2 came from is… There were… It was Jen, Jared, Bryan and Ben, so “J2B2”. And it just so happened to sound like R2D2 and we were all nerds and thought, “This is great. There’s a double entendre there.” So we were responsible for creating all of the content that went into those cartridges and most of them are still up on Wherigo.com if you search for cartridges by J2B2. So we… Essentially, we… In the very, very early stages, we picked parks around the city that we thought were interesting, and then we’d actually take a field trip out there, look around, plot out all the locations and think about what kind of story would be compelling to tell here? What could we do? What parts… What are the interesting areas in this park that we can create some interesting interactions around? So for example it was the… The first time that I’d ever been to discovery Park was for on one of those Wherigo field trips, and just went out there and walked around. And you’d have a handheld GPS device with you, and you’d be…

11:00 JS: You’d go to a place where you thought that it looked interesting and you’d record a way point, and just keep going. And that was kinda how we plotted that out. And then we’d come back to the office and think, “Okay, what would be a fun story to tell?” And so we ended up… We did everything from puzzles. Some of them were really, really involved narratives. So there was an actual story that you’d have to be part of and characters that you’d play with, and some of them were really simple. Like, we did a series of bug hunts where we had custom travel bugs that weren’t actually trackable but they had custom tags or a custom codes stamped into them, and we’d go hide them around the parks and we’d have a different Bug Hunt for each park. And you’d go and you’d find the tags. Those weren’t very successful because people would find them and steal them, and then we wouldn’t have a game anymore.

[chuckle]

11:47 Chris: And so now today, you’re working on the Adventure Lab project, and there’s… It’s certainly some components of that that hearken back to the Wherigo experience. I would think that there are… There’ve been a lot of learnings, I would assume, from your work in past years on Wherigo and now what’s happening with this event… With the Adventure Lab Project.

12:09 JS: Yeah, absolutely. One of, I think, the failures of Wherigo was the fact that it was so incredibly complicated. You, essentially, had to have a programming background to be able to build even a simple Wherigo cartridge and our builder… Even our builder app, which did have a sort of rudimentary user interface, it was still very difficult to learn. So I think, that’s probably the biggest learning or the biggest take away, that one thing we’re being very careful about with Adventure Lab is eventually, we want to enable really interesting and flexible experiences, but we have to figure out how to… What tools can we give people to unlock their storytelling abilities easily, and that’s, I think, the hardest part. So we’re starting very, very simple. There’s still a bit of narrative capacity, but who knows what we’re going to add to it. It’s going to be an interesting balance, I think, between trying to give people the tools to be creative and flexible, and not hamstring them, but also not give them so much that they can’t get…

13:15 Chris: Yeah. No, I think, I totally… I think a lot of people listening to this will be nodding their heads when they heard you talking about how difficult it could be to build a Wherigo cartridge. I know I’ve owned a couple of them, but they were all built by someone else. I would give them the story that I… And the actions that I wanted to have within the cartridge, but I didn’t have any idea where to start as far as to build it. And it’s exciting to know that with Adventure Lab that it’s… There’s not that barrier to entry that there may have been with Wherigo.

13:46 JS: Yeah, and I think… I don’t just think that Adventure Lab is necessarily going to end up being Wherigo 2.0, but I think that it will share some of those original features, and it’ll definitely be… ‘Cause if you want… We wanna be able to help people again tell that story, or whatever that is. If they wanna write a narrative adventure, then that’s great, we’ll give them a way to do that. If they want like a simple, like upleveled multi-cache or a walking tour, or whatever, they could do that as well. But there’s a lot of work to be done to get there.

[chuckle]

14:21 Chris: For you personally, I know you’re an outdoorsy person and that you do some challenging hikes and stuff like that, and you also said you didn’t know about geocaching before you started here, are you able to integrate your love of hiking and being outside [chuckle] in finding some caches? It seems like… I wanna say that I maybe found one over the summer that you had been in that area too, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh, she’s hardcore at getting up too.” [chuckle] You went, I think, you went well further than I did, and I thought that what I’d done was pretty hardcore, and then I was like, “Oh, Jen’s a level above me,” because you were mentioning some cliff or… I think you said something like, “Hey, did you ever… ” Do you remember what I’m talking about? It was…

15:01 JS: Oh, yeah, that was a bit a… That was lake Melakwa, I think.

15:04 Chris: Yeah, and you were talking about some climb you had done or some, I don’t know, repelling? I don’t know what it was, but it sounded a lot more hardcore than what I was doing.

[chuckle]

15:14 JS: It was… That’s a beautiful area. We generally don’t rope up, but I would say that the majority of my geocaching happens while hiking. I love being outside. I’m not a big walk-around-the-city fan, I guess, and I feel very self-conscious. So I’m not… When I have to search for a cache that involves some amount of stealth, I feel like I just look really suspicious.

[chuckle]

15:38 Chris: I think we all do, yeah.

[chuckle]

15:40 JS: So… But something about, well, not something about, the going-out hiking, especially as you get more remote… Some of the best caches I found are the ones that have only been found like maybe once a year or maybe once every couple of years. And sometimes if I’m going out and I’ve spent a whole day bushwhacking off-trail to get up to this perfect little lake and there’s a cache there, and I open the ammo can ’cause it’s always an ammo can, because ammo cans are everywhere in the woods.

[chuckle]

16:07 Chris: Right. Of course, yeah.

16:09 JS: And it’s… There will be geo-coins in there, and I think I picked up a geocoin at one point that hadn’t moved in seven years or something, and it was on one of my favorite off-trail adventures, Preacher Mountain, up in the cascades. No trail up there, gorgeous lake. It’s just something about that journey to get there, and you feel like you’ve accomplished something, and then you find the cache there. And now you’re sharing this accomplishment with these other people, so you feel like you’re part of an elite club. And if it was a really, really difficult journey, then there’s this element of relief that, “Oh, somebody else has been there and they know what I’ve gone through, and… ” And then I just make for really cool logs as well having that experience to write about. And I love it when I’ll post a log on a cache that I really enjoyed, and then the CEO will contact me and would say, “Oh, this is like I’m… Thank you so much, I loved reading your log.” And I’m like, “I loved writing the log and finding the cache. Thank you for placing it.” And so you have this kind of mutual admiration society thing going on. But that’s… Yeah, I love lonely caches, things of high terrain, high difficulty, that’s cool. Finding… Going places that I usually, I maybe wouldn’t think to go or that I have to expend actual effort to get there. That, to me, that’s an adventure, and that’s what it’s all about.

17:26 Chris: Right, and does that inform then your, the work that you do on these products, that you’re creating tools that help people to do that kind of stuff must be fun to, I don’t know, think about the experiences that you personally have and then trying to help, have that inform the work that you’re doing on…

17:46 JS: Yeah, absolutely.

17:46 Chris: Whatever the project might be, yeah.

17:48 JS: Yeah, I hope so. One of the things that I’m excited about, or I’m hoping that we can do in the future for the Adventure Lab app is have a better offline experience. ‘Cause for me, I want that adventure that’s 15 miles out into the back-country, that is… There’s no data, it’s GPS only. I want to… How do I write a narrative around that? How do I… There are so many opportunities for really cool storytelling, I think, and also just having a good… Even taking a hike that might otherwise be kind of boring, like something like Mailbox Peak, which I hate… [chuckle] The worst hike ever… It’s… But if you had something to keep you occupied and to keep your mind… Or to keep yourself interested, I guess, well, while doing it, that’s, to me, I think that’s one of the beauties, I think, of the platform that the Adventure Lab can have that… Well, even the Wherigo had, is that fun offline experience. You take that… Anything that can happen in your imagination, and if you blend it with the real world, that’s cool. So, I hope… I imagine that sometimes my co-workers get really tired of me being like, “What about the offline experience?” But one of these days, I think we’re gonna get there.

19:01 Chris: Well, it’s funny, you mentioned Mailbox Peak, I did that hike with Jeremy Irish, and all I… If you just would have said the words “Mailbox Peak,” I would have thought, “Oh, yeah, I remember we were at the summit, and there was the mailbox and we had great pictures.” But then you started talking about it a little bit, and I did remember switchback after switchback after switchback with no view at all…

19:22 JS: [chuckle] No view, yeah.

19:22 Chris: Except for just forest. There was nothing. It wasn’t until the very end that you got a view, and, yeah, in retrospect, I didn’t love it. [chuckle] I loved Jeremy and I had a nice time together, but, yeah, I would have liked to have had a little story to follow on some sort of an adventure app or something like that.

19:43 JS: Yeah, yeah, me too. So maybe one of these days we’ll build something.

[chuckle]

19:48 JS: I think it’s fun.

19:49 Chris: And so, obviously there’s always new challenges with this job, different things that keep you engaged and keep you having fun.

19:58 JS: Never boring working here. That’s one of the things about having such a global community, is you can’t really make any assumptions about who’s going to be using any of your products, what circumstances they’re going to be using them in… Are they going to be at home on their laptop, like, planning their next caching outing? Are they going to be actually outdoors in the middle of nowhere with no data connection on a cell phone? Or maybe they’re using a handheld GPS. There are always, always edge cases, and as a developer you’re in tune with edge cases. And yet, our community somehow manages to find every possible use case, and so, yeah, you’re never bored and you’re always like, are there still features on the website that people will bring up and I’ll think, “Huh. I didn’t know that you could use it that way.” But someone has figured out how, and it’s become a very important part of their workflow, which is really interesting to see how people… ‘Cause you anticipate that somebody’s going to use your product or your work in a certain way, and then they do a complete 180 from what you thought they were going to do and it’s still a valid and interesting use case.

[music]

21:09 Chris: That was Jen Smith, a front end developer lead, here at Geocaching HQ. Do you have something you would like us to cover on the podcast, then send us an email to podcast@geocaching.com, again, that is podcast@geocaching.com. I always enjoy hearing your suggestions and any feedback that you might have. From me and from all of my fellow lackeys here at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

[music]

Episode 30: GIFF 2019

It’s almost time for GIFF, the Geocaching International Film Festival! GIFF events are scheduled for November 7-17, 2019.

HQ’s Sven Otto is here to tell us what to expect this year.

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 here.

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Episode 30: GIFF 2019



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/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 30): GIFF

[music]

00:15 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody. This is Inside Geocaching HQ. I am Chris Ronan, aka Rock Chalk, one of the lackey at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. Thank you for having a listen to our podcast. Today, I am chatting with Sven, who is our GIFF guru here at HQ. GIFF stands for Geocaching International Film Festival. You can see the 219 GIFF films at GIFF events, which are held around the world from November 7th through the 17th. So here we go with Sven to get the lowdown on GIFF.

[music]

01:01 CR: Sven. This is your first time on the HQ podcast, so you have to tell us about what you do here, what your day-to-day job is. We’re mostly talking about GIFF here today, but when you’re not doing GIFF, what else are you doing at HQ? 

01:17 Sven: Well, first of all, thanks I having me Chris, excited to be here. In my day-to-day job, what I do is I support the community volunteers as part of the CBS team, and especially more on the technical side, in that I do quality assurance for the various admin pages that are available to volunteers behind the scenes to review caches, for example, and do the day-to-day tasks that they do to help the community.

01:47 CR: And this is just the latest thing that you’ve done. You’ve been at HQ for how long now? 

01:51 Sven: It’s been almost two and a half years now. I started in the Visitor Center for a good while and I had the pleasure to welcome in visitors from across the world. Being German helps with all the German visitors that we get as well. So that was a great pleasure, it really gave me a good insight into the details of the game, and I think prepared me pretty well for when I ultimately moved behind the scenes and joined the team that I’m on today.

02:19 CR: So for people that have met you and are familiar with your background, what part of Germany are you from? 

02:27 Sven: I’m from the Lower Saxony area. I’m from a tiny, tiny 1,000 soul village. The closest place near it that people will know will probably be Hanover, which also has two geo-tours in it. And yeah, it’s up north, at least I would consider it that. And people always joke that it’s as flat as a pancake and that you can see for miles and miles and miles.

02:53 CR: We have that in common then. Being from Kansas, people joke about that too, for me.

02:57 Sven: Yeah, being in the mountains now here is really odd sometimes.

03:01 CR: Well, I don’t know if it’s like this for you in Germany, from where you’re from in Germany, like people say, Kansas is flat as a pancake, and I always tell people, “Well, where I’m from, it’s on the very eastern part of the state and it’s right around, I don’t know, 600 to 1,000 feet elevation there. And then, the far western side, with the border of Colorado, it’s getting up towards 5,000 feet.” And I always say, “Could it really be flat as a pancake if it starts at 600 to 700 and then makes it up to almost 5,000 at the other end. Something doesn’t compute there.”

03:34 Sven: I think you could probably make the same argument for my area with the southern end of the state being near the Harz mountain region, which has the Brocken, which is one of the highest mountains in Germany other than outside the Alps of course. But then, yeah, as you get closer to the coast, the more flat it gets.

03:56 CR: And I can, for anybody, I can vouch for Sven knowing his geocaching in Germany, because he’s great about sending people like myself to good places to find caches, as I was there not too long ago, for a couple of events, and you definitely directed me to some good spots. So if people happen to meet you out in the wild, not just caches in Germany, but you also know a lot about caching around here, because you’ve gotten pretty hardcore into it over the last couple of years, wouldn’t you say? 

04:25 Sven: Yeah, I started with a good 48 finds when I got hired at HQ. I had gotten into it because my then fiance, and now wife, was a geocacher and it gave us a thing to talk about when we were at long distance, kind of adventures on the weekend type stuff. And yeah, over the past two years or so I’ve had a good 2,400 finds to my record, and have really thoroughly enjoyed my travels and the trips to the mountains on the weekends and such.

05:00 CR: And so, what’s your favorite kind of caching to do? 

05:03 Sven: Definitely caching in the mountains. The ideal cache for me will usually involve driving off-road for a little while to get to a trail head or to get out into the boonies and no cell reception land to really unplug for a little bit. And then potentially some hiking, get out there and then just have a nice big container in a nice view point at the end. That’s probably my favorite.

05:30 CR: So, work-wise, we gotta talk about work a little bit.

05:33 Sven: Right.

05:33 CR: Yeah, ugh, it’s terrible. But this is a good thing about work, GIFF, which is an event that you are very involved with. For people that don’t know what GIFF is, let’s give them an overview of it.

05:45 Sven: So, GIFF is the short form of the Geocaching International Film Festival, and it started a couple of years ago in the context of the block parties, when we asked the community to create and send in video submissions of capturing what they felt was the essence of geocaching on film, and a selection of these clips were then shown on the big screen at block party. One year, the weather was very liquid sunshine, as we like to call it in Seattle, and we got terribly rained out, and as a result of that, decided to open things up a little more and make the film reel that had been created for the block party at the time available to Geocaching events across the world. And it kinda took off from there, we’ve now headed as a world-wide event series and GIFF season, you could say, for a number of years and it’s been great fun and a great success.

06:53 CR: So what is the process like, let’s say GIFF last year ended, how does the circle start again for this year’s GIFF? Yeah, just from start to finish, what’s the first step? 

07:08 Sven: So GIFF, the last announcement essentially would have gone out towards the end of November last year announcing the Signal award winner. So the overall winner of a reviewer voting and also public winner for the best film. So pretty much around that time, we would already start our planning for the next year, so the year that we’re in right now, just getting a burn-down ready so really a step-by-step schedule of when the certain milestones have to be completed, eventually we will start the planning process for the next year.

07:48 CR: And so a call goes out at some point, asking people to submit their films. And from what I gather some people are working on these things even before that call goes out, there are some folks that really put an awful lot of effort and resources from themselves to create these films for consideration for GIFF.

08:11 Sven: Yeah, absolutely, that couldn’t be more true, what you just said. In fact got an email just the other day of somebody asking questions about what could be in a film, what could not be in a film for the next production that they’re starting to work on. So people, especially with more extensive production efforts are really starting early. And one thing that is for sure is that over the cause of the years that we’ve done GIFF now, the average quality of the video submissions that we are receiving has increased to an impressive extent. At the end of the day, it’s still an amateur film festival but some of the clips that we’re getting are really, really raising the bar for everybody else for sure, which is both a blessing and a curse, right.

[chuckle]

09:04 Sven: But yeah, so usually in the spring time, we’re gonna send out or we gonna update the GIFF website and we’re gonna open up a submission form for people to submit their film submissions for the year, the submission form usually closes some time mid-summer. And as soon as all submissions are in and then also as they continue to trickle in a panel of judges will review the submissions based on guideline compliance, like is there a cache that has depicted that maybe wouldn’t meet the guideline or is there any commercial concern with the video clip. Is it family friendly first and foremost, those kinds of things. And then this ultimately goes through an iteration of three or four different stages with the final stage being a movie night of sorts at HQ, where we all sit down and review the final, let’s say 25 submissions and then pick what usually ends up being like 16-18 finalist movies to make the final film reel.

10:21 CR: You mentioned a couple of things about what can or can’t be in one of these film submissions, talked about family-friendly and caches, wanna make sure the caches that are depicted are complying with the guidelines and things like that. Is there anything else that is really important to either include or not include when you’re considering putting one of these films together? 

10:45 Sven: One big thing definitely is that you get permission for everything, just like you should get permission for your placing geocaches at a certain location, you should get permission to use audio in your clips, which is great in the day of free audio databases, you should get permission from the cache owners, if you’re showing caches that are not your own, because some people don’t like spoilers, believe it or not.

11:08 CR: I love them myself, but no, that’s okay.

[laughter]

11:12 Sven: Other than that there’s good documentation of what you would wanna do and what you would not wanna do on the GIFF website, which is geocachingfilmfestival.com. And if in doubt you can also always shoot us an email with more specific questions to giff@geocaching.com.

11:30 CR: So when do the films start coming in for consideration? 

11:35 Sven: Well, some people have it in the pipeline and essentially are just tapping their feed ready to go as soon as the form goes live, others will wait and are still busy cutting things and compiling files and getting their videos ready. And so this year, for example, we received a good quarter of the total submissions during the final week of the window. So for me, sitting on the other end, seeing them come in, that’s always both nerve wracking and exciting, ’cause you never really know what you’re gonna get until the very end.

12:10 CR: Right. So these films come in over the course of a few months, how many are we talking about? 

12:17 Sven: This year we had roughly 60 submissions from I wanna say 23 different countries. So really international set of submissions, some countries of course being more predominant than others, we usually get a lot of submissions from the US. We get a lot of submissions from Germany. We have a couple established teams that submit stuff from Spain for example. But one thing that we were really delighted to see this year is that we received a lot of submissions also from Czechia and Slovenia and Slovakia, countries that hadn’t been as involved in GIFF in past years. So that was really great.

12:58 CR: And it is whittled down to how many for the final reel? 

13:01 Sven: This year, it’s gonna be 16.

13:03 CR: So 16 films and now we’re getting ready for the events, and there are events all over the world. How many events right now for… Well, I guess this might change by the time that we air this podcast, but generally a rough range of how many events? 

13:22 Sven: So, as we speak, we’ve just crossed the 400-proof GIFF events mark, and we’re expecting more to come in over the last couple of weeks until GIFF officially starts. Usually the form to submit your GIFF Event goes life sometime in August, so usually with three months to spare until GIFF officially starts. And how that would usually work is that you create an event listing, you make it all about GIFF, if you have some artwork and that you might already have, you can put it on there but it’s important that the focus of the event is on GIFF. You submit it for review, it gets published by your local reviewer. And then you submit it to HQ where event form for approval and then either me or one of my colleagues, ’cause luckily I have a lot of great support and people supporting me in the overall GIFF project. We’ll take a look at this submission, and if all looks well they will add it to the official list that is hosted on the HQ account, and shortly after you will receive an email from us with various creative assets that are in this year’s GIFF spirit to create art work for your event. Some people like to make even cakes that look like the GIFF norms for example or make a fun lock book or just make your cache page even more fun than it was before really.

14:52 CR: Yeah, we’ve seen some pretty remarkable events over the last few years, people that really looks like with anything else, people get creative with geocaches, they get creative with films and now they’ve found a way to get creative with these events. Some of the pictures we’ve seen from events and videos and stuff it’s really pretty amazing.

15:12 Sven: Absolutely, I’ve been involved with GIFF for a good three years now, the past two years I’ve been helping out as a supporting member essentially, and this is the first year that I’m leading the GIFF project. But last year for example, we even had a mega event that was the GIFF Event where they rented out a whole car cinema. And we’ve had, like I said, we’ve had cakes made, we’ve had whole fancy ball attire events where people are expected to wear a suit and tie and evening dresses. It’s really impressive to see how people are going above and beyond to make this as special as it can be and to honor both GIFF and also the film makers that make GIFF possible every year.

16:07 CR: And so when are the dates when the GIFF Film events will be happening? 

16:12 Sven: So that’s another exciting thing about this year. So we’re gonna be hosting GIFF starting November 7th, but because in last years it was always only one weekend and we’ve had the community reach out and say, “Hey, if I can’t make it the first weekend, the window is too short.” We opened it up for a second weekend this year, so GIFF is gonna be closing on November 17th.

16:37 CR: So people will go and watch these films at these events, what happens next? 

16:42 Sven: What happens next is there’s gonna be a public vote again this year, around the time that we GIFF events take place, slightly before and probably keep your eyes peeled for an announcement on the event cache pages, that will ask you to after watching the GIFF films, cast your public vote for what your favorite film was. And of course at the events a lot of voting happens also so a lot of events try to do their little internal votes and decide to reach out to the filmmakers who got the award at their local events and share the love. The events is really when all the work and all the effort that went into GIFF comes to fruition and comes together and people are having a good time.

17:35 CR: I wouldn’t ask you what your favorite film is either this year or from past years, but are there certain things for you just as a viewer that you find particularly enjoyable about the films that come through? 

17:47 Sven: For me personally I like when people don’t take themselves too seriously, and there’s a couple of submissions again, this year, not to take away too much that really excel at that and that bring a great sense of humor to the game, and to certain components and experiences that we’ve all experienced while being out there caching and present them in a new way, let’s put it that way.

18:14 CR: Yeah, sometimes I’ll be watching these films and think, if I wasn’t a geocacher none of this would make any sense but it’s so cool that there’s something here for me and people like me, who we know about this world and to see it on the screen is such new thing.

18:30 Sven: Absolutely. I think the films being relatable is one of the things that makes GIFF so special, ’cause you get to share the experience of watching these clips with fellow geocachers, some of which you’ve been on adventures with together as well. And you’re seeing these moments and it just triggers all kinds of great memories both good and bad and moments where you’re like shaking your head of like, “Oh yeah, remember that one time when that happened to us.” Yeah, it really is a great thing.

19:05 CR: So if people wanna know more about GIFF or find a GIFF event, what do they do? 

19:11 Sven: They should check out the public list section on the Geocaching HQ account, the GIFF 2019 event list will be available there. It’s also linked to on the GIFF website, so your geocatchinginternationalfestival.com. And it’s also linked to from various copy that is available on our blog, on our Facebook channels, on our Instagram, on our… What else do we have? Twitter, that’s right.

19:42 CR: So many places? 

19:43 Sven: So many places, social media these days. So yeah, it’s gonna be available in the social media as well and people can access it there. I’m sure there’s gonna be one in your neck of the woods if not, maybe it’s your time to host one this year.

[music]

20:00 CR: So there you go, Sven has thrown down the GIFF gauntlet. If you would like to learn more about GIFF, visit geocachingfilmfestival.com. You cannot only learn about this year’s events but you can get links to GIFF Films dating back to 2013. It is quite a rabbit hole, you can spend a lot of time on that website if you’re not careful, believe me. If you have an idea for the HQ podcast, send us an email to podcast at geocaching.com. And please rate and review us on iTunes, we would love that. Until next time from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ Transcript (Episode 29): Lists

[music]

00:14 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast where we talk about stuff happening here at HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan. My Geocaching user name is Rock Chalk. As always, thank you for downloading our podcast. On this episode, a return guest, Brendan Walsh from HQ’s product team. He is here to chat about a project that you might not see immediately, but you will definitely see it eventually. So we want you to know what’s coming. Some fun updates to list functionality on geocaching.com. I am personally pretty excited about what I’ve seen so far. I think you will be too. So here we go, me and Brendan talking Lists.

[music]

01:10 CR: Alright, well, Brendan, people are used to hearing you here on the podcast talking about the new Search and the new Map. We had you on a couple of times to talk about that. The next logical place to go is list, I think, and here you are talking about list. It is kind of a, a logical progression, isn’t it?

01:29 Brendan Walsh: It is, it is. In fact, in the mobile view, we have a nice little toggle to go from map to list, so it’s just a different visualization. If you’re looking at your caches plotted on a map, or in a list base. And thanks for having me back on, Chris. It’s always great to talk to the community. Yeah, so I’m a product manager here at HQ. And most recently, I worked on the Maps search project as you mentioned, and in that project, we run the web a lot, checking it out, of course, and really diving deep on the features that we are building for Map. We noticed we probably should give lists a little love as well. So, the same team of engineers that I worked on the Maps project with have been working on lists for the past three months or so, and we’re at a place where we’re really excited to share it with the community. We’re launching a new list hub and a new list details. And what that really means is a list hub is the visualization on the website of your list of lists.

02:31 CR: So when you go to the dashboard and it says your list, click there, that’s your list hub you go to.

02:36 BW: Exactly. The old or the existing, the one that the community is familiar with now, is very good at doing what it does, and we thought, “Okay, let’s take what has been done, the work there, and kind of take it to the next level. So we re-imagined the UI through a great work of one of our product designers here at HQ and now it looks a little more modern. We have all the controls for things you can do with a list, be it a copy or a map, or a download as GPX. Those are really obvious now and they’re not hidden behind another control or an overflow menu, so you can get to the stuff you wanna get to much quicker. If you’re on the list hub and one of your lists is maybe it’s a list you made for a Jasmer challenge you’re doing… You could click into that really easily and now you’re on the list detail page so it’s a similar view. But now, you’re seeing all the caches.

03:33 CR: And that’s a big change. The list, as I’ve looked at it, in testing, the list hub is very different. It’s exciting. It is as you said, much more accessible, even though the old one did a great job. The list details, though, it’s a big, big difference from what people were used to in the past.

03:53 BW: It’s a big difference. Thanks for calling that out. It’s gonna look a lot like or very similar to what the search results list looks like on our homepage, so you’re gonna have a list of caches, going left to right. The data… The data points we’re showing are different and more varied and more in-depth. Give you… Telling you more about the cache. If you’re logged in as yourself, Chris, and you’re looking at a list, it, be it my list, or one of your owns, where you have an indications that if you DNF’d it or if you found it, you’ll see right there the status of each cache, right? Backing up a little bit, if you’re on the list hub and you’re looking at that Chris’s favorite favorites in Washington that he’s gonna go after, we’ll tell you right there the progress you’ve made on that list. Now, it’s not always a competition, but it’s nice to know like, okay, if that list is 150 caches, you found 90 of them, and you only have this many left to go and it’s…

04:52 CR: I can’t tell you how many times I have clicked through to a list and I just scroll through it on the old version. Let’s say, I’ve got 100 caches in a list and I’ll scroll through, looking for ones that don’t have a smiley face next to them, and okay, I need to find four but it drives me crazy. Now, I’ve got this status bar that can tell me right away. Right.

05:11 BW: It tells you right upfront. Yeah, thank you. I’m glad that speaks to you guys, too. The other cool thing is, obviously, we have this multi-select control. So, this idea where I could maybe go to your profile or someone like mountain bikes who are these wonderful curators in the community building these lists that I may wanna take advantage of. So, go to your… As long as it’s public, I can go to your profile, make a copy of that list, and now I have that list too, right, and I can map it or make a subset of it.

05:44 BW: And we’re hearing from a lot of people that that is gonna be in our initial testing that that’s real pretty powerful to have access to other folks’ lists that have done the taste-making, the curation maybe ahead of time and you can reap the benefits of that. Maybe in the future, you’ll be one of those people to create lists and put them out there for others to share.

06:04 CR: We were talking about there are so many geocaching organizations out there that they maintain lists of popular caches in their areas, and to be able to go and copy those lists and then have them for yourself and, let’s say, I’m gonna be traveling somewhere and I look up an organization in… Oh, let’s say, Germany. I’m gonna go to Germany and I’m gonna… Oh, there’s this organization in this town and they’ve kept these great lists. Now I can just copy ’em, and when I go to that town, I can keep track of them on my own, which is really great.

06:35 BW: Yeah, it’s great. And I think there are other… This is sort of our first put for this new revamped, pardon me, list details and list hub. But I think as folks use lists more and perhaps share them, and we’re gonna encourage that sharing them within the community from user to user, sharing them and opening them on your mobile device, which is a great use case. It’s a little bit more friction now than we’d like so with this release, we’ll get closer to actually having a deep link right to that list details page, if you’re sharing it. So you can go from planning to caching pretty easily without a lot of copy, paste, open in this tab, and send to this friend. It’s just gonna be a lot more direct. Probably a good time to talk about how we’re gonna roll it out.

07:22 BW: We’re looking to get this new list project out beginning on September 5th. And we’re gonna start rolling it out in a slow and deliberate manner. In the past, we did a slow rollout with maps and we had quite a bit of learnings from that rollouts. And in this one, we are doing a lot of pre-release show and tell, if you will, with not only lackeys, but with some reviewers and a group we have called play testers, which are actual community members who are opted into this group, who get a first look at some things. And they’re giving us some feedback on it as well.

07:57 BW: So beginning on the 5th, we’ll start this rollout using a tool we have here at HQ that allows us to kind of put this out to a small percentage of users, new users, and assess feedback, see what they’re thinking about it, take that feedback in, and either make changes or not, depending on how it goes, and then continue to roll it out. And we’re looking at having the entire list, the new list experience out some time in the end of October of this year. So it’s very slow and deliberate. It’s our first time doing it quite like this. Some tech organizations call it a canary rollout, in the sense that, you put a little bit out there, and you get some feedback or some signals from that canary in the coal mine telling you how your release is going through the community. And then you can make decisions about whether you wanna roll it out faster or keep that same pace.

08:51 CR: Yeah, so if you’re hearing this right now and you’re not seeing it, you’re gonna see it eventually. It might take some time. There’s no way for somebody to come and ask for it. They just have to wait their turn, [chuckle] essentially.

09:02 BW: It would be difficult for us to scale that in terms of offering that to each individual member. The hope here is that by doing this slow, deliberate, rollout, we actually hit the market fit, meaning, we deliver what we expect the customer would want. So we’ve done lots of, some research and user testing, but we don’t really know until we put it out there. The other part is our focus on quality. We wanna make sure this is rock solid. So by putting it out slowly, our risk is minimized.

09:35 CR: There’s some great features to talk about here, but before we get into those, how does your team prioritize which features to tackle, and what to try to incorporate into both the hub and the list details? There’s all kinds of stuff you could do, but how do you decide what’s gonna go in there?

09:55 BW: That’s a good question. Well, the cool thing here about HQ is we have a community who’s really passionate and we have so much feedback. Product managers who were here before I even started working here have handed me oodles of notes and feedback on all things, not just lists, but specific to the lists project, what we did is we did a process I would call customer development. So really understanding your customers, the different types of customers that are out there. So, not everybody is the most experienced geocacher who might go out every day or every weekend, there’s different stripes of geocachers.

10:33 BW: So, trying to engage with all different types who represent sort of a different segment of the geocaching community, asking them what works, what doesn’t work, asking lackeys what works and what doesn’t work, using tools. Once we get through the initial design process when we feel like we have perhaps a new list hub that is interesting, we started testing that. So we use tools like user testing, where we crowdsource actual users who have geocaching accounts and they give us feedback. We rinse and repeat and on all that, and just try to get better as we go with taking in feedback and making changes to our designs or our code. And we get to a place where you’re never gonna have 100% certainty, but we have enough that we wanna share it with the community and we start getting real feedback and that’s when we go to production.

11:23 BW: In terms of, I think, at a higher level, prioritizing what we go build on or what we go build for each quarter, and stepping away from lists a little bit. It’s a combination of looking at what our company’s goals are for that year and what our mission statement is, and then what we can do as a team in the space that we work in, on the web, to go help go influence those goals, whatever they may be.

11:47 CR: Well, like I said, there’s a lot of interesting features here, and [chuckle] this being audio and not video, we can’t show them, but just some of the things that stood out to me is, especially on the… Well, let’s start with the list hub. As you said, it used to be that, well, on the current one that a lot of people might still be seeing when they listen to this, but eventually, when you get the new list hub, the stuff’s just more accessible. It used to be you would have to tap on that little dot, dot, dot. And now, stuff is more… There’s still a few things in there.

12:20 BW: There are.

12:21 CR: But what is the dot, dot, dot called? Is that a…

12:23 BW: Well, we call it an…

[laughter]

12:25 CR: Is it not the dot dot dot officially?

12:27 BW: We’re officially changing it to the dot dot dot. I think, officially, it’s been called the overflow menu, and then, anecdotally, it’s been called the meatball menu by…

12:38 CR: Meatball might be better than dot dot dot.

12:39 BW: Meatballs, if you haven’t had lunch, you you might not wanna call it that, but… That is where things have been basically resided. That’s more of a mobile design aspect as well. And because the mobile space, you have very little of it, you’re hiding not hiding, you’re storing lots of controls behind that panel. We have, in our new list hub and list details, we have what we’re calling an action bar, which is a horizontal bar that looks like a header. It sits on top of all the lists. If you’re on the list hub or all the caches, if you’re on details, now, across that bar are gonna be the various controls that you could do for the list, so you could map the list if you click that. You could copy the list. You could download it as GPX, you could change your privacy settings on it. You could turn on notifications you could create a pocket query. All the things you can do now they’re just represented differently. And you’re one click, excuse me, one click away as opposed to two or three.

13:43 CR: Right, right. And then once you choose a list and you’re in the list details, being able to sort those columns.

13:51 BW: That’s new.

13:52 CR: Totally new.

13:53 BW: That’s totally new.

13:53 CR: And a lot of different columns, stuff we didn’t see before. So things like favorite points and difficulty in terrain and it’s much more robust than it used to be.

14:04 BW: Yeah, thanks. And we… This came from the engineers. They’re looking at what the work we just did on the search results page, we’re showing that level of data and they’re coming to me and saying, “Hey, we have space on the page, let’s show more stuff. So that really came from within and that was great. Let’s show favorite points, especially on a page like Favorites, where don’t you wanna sort on favorite points to see. You gave that cache a favorite but wouldn’t it be interesting to see who else did? And it sort of almost a validation moment. Yeah, that cache really was great, it wasn’t just me. And now that we’re talking about favorites. One thing that’s very small, but I think it’s gonna be really helpful for everybody is right across the top, on list hub, we have what we call a segmented controller, so you’ll see it says my lists. So when you’re on list hub, it says my lists, and then going over one, it’s gonna say favorites, and you click there, you got your favorites view. And then a list that a lot of us may or may not use, or may not know about.

15:08 BW: We have a list called ignored caches. So you add a cache to this list, if you just want it out of the realm of your Geocaching experience. So if you went and searched on a location and you added that, you sorted by ignore list, you wouldn’t see the caches that are on that list. Those kind of things.

15:26 CR: I tend to forget it’s even there, because it’s right now, at the very bottom.

15:30 BW: It’s hard to find.

15:31 CR: Yeah, it’s at the very bottom and now it has a lot more visibility up there at the top, which is really good. Are there other things that new features and we could go on forever about some of the new stuff but is there anything else that is standing out to you heading into this?

15:46 BW: I think the one thing that is interesting is the ability to take giant lists, and make subsets of them and then within the… So, for instance, using the multi-control, you could take a list, let’s say, like 500, maybe it’s yours, for instance, I can copy it and just make a subset of it, of the 20 or so I need… And from there, I can also continue to add more geocaches. We built a nice little UI that you can engage with that you could put in the GC code if you know it.

16:14 BW: If you wanted to add a specific cache to your list or you could quickly go to the map, do a search, then add those caches to your list. So, it’s a start for sure. I’m really excited to get it out there. And like I said, the mantra I’ve been going with is collect. So collect the caches that you want in your planning stage, that you wanna go after, connect, so you could use the list as a way to connect with your friends by sharing it. It sort of could be the connective tissue within the game and then go caching, once you’ve done that work, you just… You’re consuming that list out in the field.

16:53 CR: Collect Connect Cache, that’s a t-shirt, right there.

16:57 BW: I like t-shirts.

16:58 CR: I know you do. Yeah, I wanna see that. We gotta see that t-shirt. Collect Connect Cache.

17:02 BW: Think of them… I think one of the inspirations too was playlists. So the way you would share a playlist with your friends, if you’re into music, could lists have the power to be something like that? And what if we made them really cool? And then, we’ll eventually be partnering with our marketing team to get the word out and start talking about these and hopefully, folks enjoy them as much as we had enjoyment building them.

17:28 CR: So September 5th, around then, this will start. It will continue up until early October. What’s your team doing during that time period as you’re pulling, as you’re gathering feedback, and what have you?

17:42 BW: Gotcha. We’re gathering feedback, for sure. We’re also doing our final polish passes. So, for instance, there’s too much white space here. We wanna change the pattern here, so like our last minute fit and finish on the actual look and feel, and any kind of bugs that reveal themselves through this process. We’ll be working on those. So like I said, we’ll be pretty much heads down on this into the September timeframe, and at which point, we liked at HQ here, we have what we call a warranty period. So after we ship something, the team that’s responsible for it is still all hands on deck for that initial 30 days. And then after that, we’ll be assessing our priorities for 2020 per the product and engineering direction and perhaps working on something else or perhaps, based on the feedback, adding more features to lists.

[music]

18:35 CR: That was Brendan Walsh, Senior Product Manager at Geocaching HQ. For more about lists, check out the Geocaching Help Center and the release notes section of the Geocaching forums. We will also have a blog post coming soon as the scaled roll-out proceeds. Got something you’d like to hear about on the podcast? Just drop us a line to podcast@geocaching.com. That is podcast@geocaching.com. And as always, thanks for listening. From me and my fellow lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.