Note: this only reflects my personal work this week. Visit the BTC Map Blog for consolidated monthly reports.
Auth
BTC Map now has opt‑in authentication, and it’s a necessary step in the project’s evolution. In organic communities, admins often start as regular users, so onboarding new admins is difficult without a pool of user accounts that have built up digital reputation over time.
Another reason to sign up is the ability to save places and areas, which enables personalized activity feeds based on your locations of interest.
Activity Feeds
Looking at maps is fun, but it’s almost impossible to see what’s changed since your last visit. Maybe your city had 50 Bitcoin merchants and now it has 51. How do you find that needle in a haystack?
Solving such problems requires a temporal activity feed. The feed can be scoped to a local area or a set of your favorite places and areas. I believe this feature will improve BTC Map’s usability in a big way.
Performance
My performance work focused on improving cold start time in the Android app. Previously, it queried all places and fed them to a clustering engine, which took about a second to complete. As a result, users stared at an empty map while waiting for places to load.
The new algorithm only queries the visible area, with some safety margins, to avoid re‑querying the database if the user moves the map slightly.
Website
No contributions
API
- REST authentication
- New endpoints for managing saved places and areas
- Allow binding events to areas
- Support cron‑like schedules for recurring events
- Support wide icons for areas
- Documentation updates
Android
- Implement authentication
- Add saved places and areas management UI
- Implement activity feed
- Display upcoming events in the activity feed based on cron schedules
- Filter out outdated places by default
- Speed up cold start
- Add area screen
- Improve module isolation and composition
- Increase test coverage
Future Plans
The Android app will need some polish before it’s ready for the next release, so I suspect I’ll be busy with that. There are also quite a few things to refactor and optimize on the API side, so that will be my secondary priority.