I have been contributing my photos to Google Maps since 2017. Until today, my pictures have collected almost two million views.

Some of them make me proud: El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, streets and corners of San Francisco, all the Bay area food you can eat and capture on a camera. And what is the most popular one? Not El Captain, not the ocean, not even cosy coffee shops in Prague but… IKEA in Palo Alto (300+ thousand views).

In hindsight, it is obvious why. My Motorola X4 camera can’t compete with iPhone or Google Pixel and I am not much of a photographer. When my photo gets popular, it is because most people did not find the scene worth capturing but the place is heavily visited on Google Maps. My photo might not be nice but it is nevertheless useful.

Similarly, there are pieces of my work and code, I am proud of. And other pieces that - for some reason - people keep using. Because it is not always easy to recognize them in advance, I will keep this blog as a journal of my experiments and my mistakes. The blog itself is an experiment with fastai’s fastpages. And in the process of setting it up, I accidentally send a very stupid pull request to the original repo. So, everything is going just great.