Infrastructure/Data Engineer at Strava
By: Joe Gomez
Locate | Pier 27, San Francisco, CA | May 30–31, 2018
Locate — two days of all things maps, location data, and sensors — is just around the corner, and one of the themes we’ll be exploring is how custom maps create a competitive advantage for companies and enable new user experiences. There’s no longer one single map solution for everyone. Developers are customizing maps to their community of users, and they’re leveraging location data in new ways.
At Locate, you’ll hear from Drew Robb, Data and Infrastructure Engineer at Strava.
Drew helped lead the development of Strava’s Global Heatmap, which visualizes two years of trailing data from Strava’s global network of athletes. It encompasses 700 million activities, 1.4 trillion latitude/longitude points, and 7.7 trillion pixels rasterized, accounting for 5 terabytes of raw input data.
It’s extremely rewarding to solve these challenges with massive location datasets and bring to life a new experience that we had otherwise thought would be too difficult or costly. -Drew Robb, Strava
Drew, what do you think are the key challenges ahead of us when you think about engineering new user experiences with location data?
I’m always thinking about how we scale our large datasets. When building the global heatmap, inlining one function call in an inner loop that is called 10’s of trillions of times sped up that job by a factor of 3. A few optimizations like that can honestly make or break the viability of projects at scale, especially while in the prototype phase.
Are there any new, exciting things Strava is doing with custom maps and location features that you can tease?
It isn’t totally user facing, but I’m working on a new algorithm for determining similarity between activities. It uses locally sensitive hashing and fast similarity estimation. It’s asymptotically faster in theory and about 100x faster in practice than the existing system. This algorithm has many applications including route and event/race discovery.
What are you personally most excited about exploring at Locate?
I’m really looking forward to learning how technical leaders from other businesses build value from geo-properties, and I also want to discover new location related tools that I can build with.
In the coming weeks, we’ll announce more speakers, as well as interactive code labs to hone your map skills and hands-on demos from leading companies. We’re also racing robocars. Grab your tickets, we’re almost out.
Speaking @ Locate: Drew Robb was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.