Category: Article
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Ur Uber
The other day a former classmate described a project of mine in 2010 as “the idea for Uber before Uber was even a thing”. Nearly 15 years later, I thought it would be interesting to pen some reflections on how we came by the idea and why we didn’t pursue it. Mowbb Mowbb* would make…
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trippler development notes
This is the behind-the-scenes companion post to a resilient charging planner, sharing more on the development process and how the app works, with links back to earlier work. Design philosophy I wanted to focus on the core problem of interactively exploring charging options under varying trip requirements. I wanted a tool that I would use…
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A resilient charging planner
Check out the prototype of trippler, an interactive charging planner for resilient EV road trips. Based on my own EV road trip experience, trippler is as much about easily understanding charging options and contingencies, to reduce charger anxiety, as it is about coming up with a single best plan. If you’re looking for the latest…
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Data complications
Solving EV charger anxiety used maths for better road trips, but skipped over using real data. Let’s fix that, or at least try to… The easy bits To get from A to B in an EV, I used Open Route Service to find a base route to a destination and and Open Charge Map to…
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Solving EV charger anxiety
Many EV adventures are accessible using the charging network in Victoria, but faulty chargers still have the potential to induce charger anxiety on road trips. Planning apps–EV drivers’ constant companions–may not fully solve this when the reported status of chargers is unreliable and faults are prevalent. As a driver, I want resilient plans that already…
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GenAI stone soup
GenAI (typically as an LLM) is pretty amazing, and you can use it to help with tasks or rapidly build all kinds of things that previously weren’t feasible. Things that work some of the time. The soup But do you find yourself reworking large chunks of generated content, or face major hurdles in getting a…
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EV snow’d tripping
Adventures with EVs often involve big mountain climbs, which consume additional energy, impacting range. I recently had the opportunity to drive climbs from Bright to Omeo and back via Mt Hotham, in Gunaikurnai and Taungurung country, and get a sense for how EVs handle hills. I collected efficiency data for each leg of a road…
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What to expect when you weren’t expecting an R&D project
This was supposed to be a regular digital project that consistently made progress towards the objective… right? Problem statement, some analysis, build a solution bit by bit, deploy, …, nice linear progression… but no… we were wrong! It turned out to be an R&D project. Often R&D projects change direction and sometimes seem to go…
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EV adventuring with resilience
Road trips are the most demanding EV scenario currently in Australia, especially to remote destinations. However, a little planning shows that they are still quite doable. Did the plans survive contact with reality? Mostly. In short, it was a pleasure to drive an EV long distances and the only inconvenience was faulty public charging infrastructure.…
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R&D burn up
This article captures the key points of a conversation I have quite often with teams involved in exploratory work, and their stakeholders. Typical burn up We’re used to burn up charts looking like the examples in this description from Atlassian – a roughly horizontal scope line which we work towards with a roughly diagonal completed…