How Simplicity Will Save GIS

It’s 2014 — we have consumer robots and electric cars, private spacecraft, planet colonization projects, and the Higgs Boson is confirmed, but GIS software is still a mess. You might be able to make sense of it all if you’re a GIS specialist with an academic background, but other creative individuals — designers, developers, tinkerers of all kinds, each with a vision and desire to create meaningful and beautiful maps and visualizations — are constantly losing battles against bloat, clutter, and complexity.

How do we reverse this GIS entropy? What does it take to turn complex technology into something that anyone can use and contribute to? An attempt to answer by the creator of Leaflet, a simple JS library that changed the world of online maps forever.

Transcript

1. how simplicity will save GIS Vladimir Agafonkin 10.09.14
2. Vladimir Agafonkin
3. how simplicity will save GIS
4. how simplicity will save GIS
5. GIS is hard
6. 6.5 years building map apps
7. author and maintainer of
8. by far the most used open source map library
10. still clueless about GIS
12. typical FOSS4G talk
15. clueless about GIS exactly the reason why Leaflet succeeded
16. story recap now with animated GIFs!
17. April 2008
18. 22 years old
19. so I’m doing maps now, how hard could this be?
21. maps huh? • image tiles involved • pan and zoom with a mouse • maybe put some stuff on top
22. PFF
23. Lets build a JS API from scratch!
24. NO
25. — don’t reinvent the wheel — there’s a mature established open source solution — lets build a wrapper
26. OpenLayers >100,000 lines of code? hundreds of features? megabytes of JavaScript?
28. building an API wrapper
29. #osmdev: hey guys, what do you think about making a simple, lightweight OL alternative?
30. no way you could do that
31. wasting time instead of contributing
32. community: worthless idea ! boss: don’t reinvent the wheel
34. oh wait
36. building from scratch; didn’t tell anyone
38. a couple weeks later
39. Web Maps Lite
42. born as a protest against bloat, clutter and complexity
43. 3 years later: open source!
44. now
55. but how?
56. simplicity
57. thought process of an aspiring map app creator:
58. I want to learn GIS, reading books and academic papers and articles about geospatial data, map projections, server-side technologies, databases, different geospatial standards and protocols and their implementations in available range of server and client software, perform analysis of my data and use cases, preferably involving other GIS specialists and do a lot of other research so that I can make sensible decisions about the required technology stack, adjust it to the needs of my application and finally make а f**king map (maybe in a couple years)
59. I want a map right now
61. get the tech out of my way
62. application development is a creative process
63. technology should bridge the gap between creative thinking and the end result
64. dr ken robinson I believe this passionately: that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.
65. you must unlearn what you have learned
66. let me create, explore, experiment, and learn along the way
67. we spend so many years learning things before we get the chance to understand how to apply our knowledge
68. creative learning: create learn
69. “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” —Albert Einstein
70. dead simple to get started dead simple to understand dead simple to use
71. don’t force me to think about unimportant things until I’m ready to address them convention over configuration:
72. complexity fills your mind, makes it slow and inert, it dumbs you down
75. simplicity frees your mind, unleashes your creativity and learning potential
78. simplicity enables you to do more with less
79. decision process of a company that’s looking to add a map to their service:
80. so lets hire a GIS consulting firm to do some research for us and choose the right technology stack and then help us set it up and consult our developers so that they could get more familiar with it and maybe also buy some enterprise support plan and…
81. hey front-end guy! make a map!
83. the most successful tech companies have the tinkerer culture
84. creative + productive + happy => awesome apps
85. lots of awesome apps => community growth & tech exposure
86. simplicity attracts a vibrant community
87. simplicity means focus on the essentials, which leads to higher quality
88. “Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.” —Edsger Dijkstra
89. thou shalt not try to cover all the use cases
93. feature need complexity simplify
94. simplicity means easier profiling and less bottlenecks, which leads to better performance
95. RBush
96. simplify.js
97. seidel + earcut OSM building (15 vertices) earcut x 707,439 ops/sec pnltri x 227,890 seidel x 77,236 poly2tri x 29,354 libtess x 21,875 ! monkey (1204 vertices): seidel x 608 libtess x 342 poly2tri x 239 earcut x 219 pnltri x 112 dude shape (94 vertices): earcut x 33,620 pnltri x 13,626 seidel x 10,037 libtess x 4,362 poly2tri x 3,773
98. simplicity makes people less hesitant to contribute
99. simplicity makes it easier to concentrate
102. simplification is how the technological progress happens
103. hard problem
104. manageable problem
105. simple problem harder problem
107. binary code assembler C scripting languages
108. jQuery
109. Ruby on Rails
110. node.js
111. “Simplicity is the outcome of technical subtlety. It is the goal, not the starting point.” —Maurice Saatchi
112. “oh but we’re not paid to do simple things!”
114. people who resist progress, unwilling to learn and adapt continuously, are in denial and always fail
115. you don’t think about simplicity when complexity is taken for granted
116. paradox of fitness: you don’t realize the benefits of regular exercise until you become more physically fit
117. simplicity is a muscle, it needs to be exercised consistently
119. lets make a collective conscious effort to simplify GIS technology
120. so that we can be happy and build more awesome stuff!
123. thank you