Author: Taylor Robbins Date: September 9th 2025

I recently made the decision to leave my job in the game industry and work on my side project full time. The side project I ended up settling on is a tool in a field of expertise that I have not personally had a lot of experience with, and although the goal of the project is to make something that I might use and therefore I have some intuition about what kinds of might not exist that I want to make, I don't actually know much about the existing endeavors in the space, or the breadth of the target audience I am designing for. I suspect that one of the following may be true:

1. My goals have been considered before and either the software already exists but is not well known, or it has been implemented in a sub-optimal way negating the value proposition of the workflow. For example maybe the tool is only available in a web browser, or only available for dekstop, or only works on a small set of data before slowing down, etc.
2. The tool I want is particularly hard to implement, meaning that even though the value of the tool would be high, it's not possible to create and previous attempts have never reached a state of release that I would be able to find.
3. The tool I want is indeed “novel” in the sense that no one in the space has tried to make this type of tool. This is uncommon in the sense that a person that has a lot of experience in a field has likely come across a lot of the “low hanging fruit” kind of ideas, so my ignorant view on the space is less likely to actually prove novel. However, if we talk about the specific form that I imagine the tool existing, the “cross pollination” between two areas of work does often result innovative ideas. For example, my experience making games leads me to think a lot about “fun” interactions and good user experience (UX) patterns as a primary concern and I don't often consider absolute robustness of the tool to be the primary concern (which might not be true for someone coming from an academic background).

• First proper use of double
• Remembering my focus (end user, produce and consume, game-y)
• Offline rendering of tiles. Downloading subsets of data from API. Map display expectations from users that are hard to implement in real-time.
• The size of OpenStreetMaps data. Space partititioning. Back of the envelope math for computational capability for an average laptop/desktop. How much distributed computing do we need to solve the problem?