OAKLAND WE DID IT!!!! 🏆

Another new UI detail on alpha.cartokit.dev — smart tooltips 💅 Smart tooltips: • Dynamically determine the topmost interactable layer under the mouse and only show attributes of that layer. • Perform screen edge detection and pick a space-optimal placement. • Can be turned on/off per layer. Zing!

Some nice new UI 🧈 in latest cartokit—UI tooltips and keybindings. I love the feel of Figma's keybindings so much, so I added a whole host to cartokit. It's wild how much faster you can navigate the interface! Out now on alpha.cartokit.dev 💅

Hello friends, especially Chicago friends. Today for @grist.org, @wbez.org, and @insideclimatenews.org, we've published an investigation into Chicago's lead pipe crisis and an accompanying interactive map. You can read the story here: grist.org/accountabili... A quick 🧵 follows.

Out today—a new interactive I worked on with @compatibilism.bsky.social mapping lead pipes in Chicago. You can use this tool to check any water service line in the city for lead, and explore how lead exposure overlaps with race and class. Check out the full piece: grist.org/accountabili...

Now out in limited preview on alpha.cartokit.dev — edit your map using natural language with GPT 4.1! Our integration leverages cartokit's deterministic code generation, so generated programs are _always_ valid. Want access? Consider signing up for our user study! forms.gle/4sUjSqSEEy7N...

One of the hardest parts of cartography is constructing the visual hierarchy for your base and data layers. Now out in alpha.cartokit.dev v0.14.0—support for 5️⃣0️⃣ different basemaps (or your own custom one)! Seamlessly shift between styles to see what works best with your data.

A long time coming—cartokit v0.13.0 introduces support for heatmaps! Available now up on alpha.cartokit.dev.

New piece out today @grist.org that I helped build out! Outstanding reporting by @alleenbrown.bsky.social with the usual stellar editing and art direction from many folks at Grist. Give it a read! grist.org/project/indi...

This was Vin Scully's call of Henry Aaron's 715th home run. Tonight Major League Baseball cut off the first sentence, starting it with the "What a marvelous moment" part because they don't want to anger the white supremacists who run our country and of whom Rob Manfred is an ardent supporter.

Nourishment for my soul, Ceddy is cold as hell

Nothing like the sweet relief of finishing a conference talk. Literally 10,000 pounds lighter. (And if you still want to chat about patch-recon or learn more about cartokit, I’ll be around PLDI thru tonight—sadly have to skip early tomorrow AM 😭)

Another PLDI ‘25 talk announcement! My good friend and collaborator Justin Lubin is going to be speaking about his AMAZING work on Programming by Navigtion shortly (20 mins!) in Orchid. He was kind enough to let me freeload on his brilliant ideas to contribute a small morsel to the paper. Come thru!

Well, I was too lazy to get the pre-print up, but the full paper is now up on the ACM DL (open access!): dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... And if you or your pals are at PLDI ‘25, come to the talk on Thursday (10:30am in Orchid) and say hi!

Doing the absolute corniest thing possible but damn it if I didn't earn the right.

Finally got around to reading this! Super enjoyable, and the concepts remind me a lot of @shadaj.me’s work on hydro.run and distributed stream types. Good abstractions for reasoning about distributed systems as a single program seem…pretty awesome?

The Luke Kornet game. Unreal.

A few hours later, this bears repeating.

I once helped judge an NBA hackathon with Luke Kornet. He seemed like a really good dude. I did not foresee him blocking six shots in an elimination game. This concludes my Luke Kornet story.

O captain, my captain! (me addressing Derrick White)

This second round of the NBA playoffs is drunk (in a good way)

Very chuffed and excited to share that my paper with Justin Lubin and @schasins.bsky.social, "Fast Direct Manipulation Programming with Patch-Reconciliation Correspondence", is set to appear at PLDI '25 in Seoul! More details and a pre-print for folks coming soon 👀

ICYMI last week, some amazing (and frightening) reporting on warehouses leaking ethylene oxide. I got to work with @gristnews.bsky.social's video producer, Jesse Nichols, to build this scroll-linked animation showing how ethylene oxide off-gassing works, exposing folks to the toxic carcinogen.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

In a timeline of terrible things, Wilyer Abreu made my heckin’ day.

Easily the best part of my days is getting to use programming to lift up the outstanding reporting, design, illustration, and editorial work that goes into a piece like this. Couldn’t be prouder of this story—go read it! (Also, we save your place as you read, so take your time and savor it 🧡)

ABC News has now fully taken down the old 538 website, including all interactive projects since 2014. Aside from erasing history this prevents access to publicly released data, including raw polls, averages, model estimates & story dta. Totally unacceptable for a company (allegedly) doing journalism

Also, I'll be at #NICAR25 (repping @gristnews.bsky.social) starting tomorrow! Would love to chat with folks in the data journalism x web dev x cartography space! I'll also be recruiting for a (paid) user study, which will give you access to a new version of cartokit with experimental LLM support 👀

Now out in cartokit v0.10.0—undo + redo! Move through map versions without losing any past edits! This was a super fun feature to implement. I also love that we support more "difficult" undo cases, like backing out destructive updates that change the underlying geometry 💅

Go check out this awesome new interactive by @compatibilism.bsky.social! It allows you to dive deep into the details of >85k federal infrastructure and climate projects, many of which are currently at risk.

An extremely exciting addition to cartokit v0.9.0—globe support 🌎 You can now interactively toggle between globe and web mercator using the switch in our fancy new toolbar 💅

I promised the deep-dive into how this works, so here it is: observablehq.com/@parkerziegl... In essence, cartokit is structured as a compiler with multiple backends, one for each library-language combination. We use some fancy code splitting to dynamically load backends at run time! Extremely fun!

Our latest: 10 Western states are using revenue extracted from Indigenous land (secured via violence-backed cessions) to fund state prison systems. For @gristnews.bsky.social with @alleenbrown.bsky.social and @mariaparazorose.bsky.social grist.org/indigenous/p...

Newly landed in cartokit v0.8.0—TypeScript support! You can now interactively generate any combination of MapLibre GL JS, Mapbox GL JS, TypeScript, and JavaScript for your map, and switch between them instantaneously. I'll also post a technical deep-dive into how this works tomorrow 👀 Stay tuned!

this is what doing a phd is like

Man, there’s nothing like coming home to the East Bay. My place.

On Friday at @gristnews.bsky.social, we published a deep dive into the efforts of Yakama Nation to win back land wrongfully held by Washington State — and the legal morass that has ensued: grist.org/indigenous/s... As part of the piece, I built this interactive visualizing the story of Tract D.

This book—from an unbelievably talented researcher, journalist, writer, and friend—is so deeply good. If you read one thing this last week of 2024, make it The Weight of Nature.

cartokit v0.6.0 and v0.6.1 come with an exciting update—codegen support for MapLibre GL JS! You can now interactively change the compiler's backend to translate programs seamlessly between Mapbox GL JS and MapLibre GL JS. Come with data and let cartokit handle the code! github.com/parkerziegle...

A few months back @gristnews.bsky.social, we published a big investigation into state trust lands on reservations and the extractive practices occurring on those parcels. I worked on the main interactive map for the piece, which allows you to explore 2 million acres of these trust lands in detail 🧵

Trans people are great. Trans women pose no threat to me as a cis woman, in bathrooms or anywhere else. Stamp anti-trans shit out everywhere you see it, and call your reps and demand they do the same.

civic tech... the gateway drug to maps...

The farther I get into my PhD, the more I realize my mentorship value add for undergrads is teaching them arcane React knowledge, the ability to write and fix CSS from memory, and how to use the DevTools debugger. And honestly I'm good with that—they all want to learn it, and yet no one teaches it 😬

Me using Web Workers in cartokit to run code generation off the main thread: "Haha fuck yeah!! Yes!!" Me realizing we're serializing and deserializing hundreds of MBs of GeoJSON on on every compilation: "Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck."

I am _begging_ newsrooms to stop using non-population-normalized categorical choropleths to show the incoming vote share 😭

You're probably gonna see a lot of maps tonight. If you happen to need to program one, we've got you covered at alpha.cartokit.dev! Get started here: docs.cartokit.dev/get-started/ (Oh, and here's the TX 2020 Senate vote breakdown by county, in 39 seconds.)

Exciting day for cartokit—we have an initial docs site! docs.cartokit.dev The Get Started guide walks you through creating an exact replica of the choropleth example from the D3 docs, all without writing 𝘢 𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘥𝘦 yourself 💅

The problem with writing code with your fancy noise-canceling headphones on is that you can't hear your MacBook fans whirring from the MASSIVE memory leak you just wrote 😅

A little nugget from last week's alpha.cartokit.dev release—support for custom vector tile basemaps! Just pass a url to a MapLibre style spec or add the JSON spec directly and you're off to the races. Something like this cheeky orange-blue variant on Stamen's Toner tiles is just a click away.

I've been pretty quiet here recently, but for good reason—I've been spending the past few months working on maps, graphics, and web dev with the awesome team @gristnews.bsky.social on "Misplaced Trust." grist.org/project/equi... If you haven't had the chance to give it a read, it's well worth it!