Babylist is the leading marketplace and commerce destination for baby, where 8+ million people each year buy what they need to welcome a new baby. We're looking for talented Site Reliability Engineers and Software Engineers who are excited to scale out a world-class consumer and ecommerce experience. Our stack is based on Ruby on Rails and React. We are passionate about experimentation, automation and shipping value to our customers.

Open roles: - Senior Engineering Manager, Babylist Shop

- Senior Engineering Manager, Babylist Shop

- Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Platform

- Senior Software Engineer, Android

- Senior Software Engineer, Growth

Details: https://www.babylist.com/jobs

Reminds me of this project which I stumbled across recently: https://www.traintrackr.io/

I happened to be in Sacramento with him a few years back for a meeting and we dropped by the building for a quick tour and verbal history lesson.

1. https://urbanfootprint.com/

https://www.barshiru.com/

> The Bay Area’s first hi-fi vinyl listening bar. We focus on playing records in their entirety on a fully analog sound system in a space that was built with acoustics as a first priority. Our aim is to provide every guest with a unique and intimate experience that allows for both intentional listening and conversation at normal volumes. If you like good music, good drinks and good company, come through, we’d love to see you!

Also, here's the subtitle for some context:

SB 50 seeks to address California’s severe housing shortage. We examine the data to unpack the potential impacts.

And...

California State Senator Scott Weiner’s Senate Bill 50 aims to address California’s housing crisis by stimulating more housing development in existing residential areas. SB 50 made it one step closer to law last month as it made it past the Senate’s Governance and Finance Committee. Like so many bills, as SB 50 winds through the legislature and grows in complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand and measure the potential impacts of the proposed legislation.

1. https://urbanfootprint.com/

(edited for formatting)

At UrbanFootprint, we provide data and tools for urban planners to assess and compare the impacts of land use and transportation decisions. A basic use case is a city updating its General Plan, which would start with a forecast of how much population growth is anticipated / needs to be accommodated. A planner then needs to assess where new residents will live, work, shop, and play. Perhaps even more essential, how are people going to travel between all of these activities? Will the new growth be auto-dependent, transit-focused, walkable? Is any of the existing or planned development in hazard areas such as flood of wildfire? What are the energy and water use impacts of the plans?

We’re using Python and Postgres/PostGIS on the backend to answer these questions and a React SPA to serve it up and make it interactive in a browser. It's a lot of fun getting our hands dirty with data describing the physical world in which we live in now, in addition to modeling the future of cities.

If this type of work interests you please get in touch - email me at hn@urbanfootprint.com. I'm always interested in hearing from folks who want to use technology to improve cities.

A basic use case is a city updating its General Plan, which would start with a forecast of how much population growth is anticipated / needs to be accommodated. A planner then needs to assess where new residents will live, work, shop, and play. Perhaps even more essential, how are people going to travel between all of these activities? Will the new growth be auto-dependent, transit-focused, walkable? Is any of the existing or planned development in hazard areas such as flood of wildfire? What are the energy and water use impacts of the plans?

We’re using Python and Postgres/PostGIS on the backend to answer these questions and a React SPA to serve it up and make it interactive in a browser.

Also, if you happen to live in California, UrbanFootprint is available for free to your city through our California Civic Program (http://info.urbanfootprint.com/california-civic-program) so feel free to nudge them to get in touch ;)

To expand that SimCity analogy to its breaking point: I've long fantasised a game/simulator crossover that tries to get as close as possible to simulate a city. Down to, say, individual agent's decision to eat out or shop for groceries, and the resulting traffic etc.

Is that something you see happening in the (longish-term) future?

This is already in common use as far as I'm aware. Its used in the Netherlands to predict electrical grid load based on the number of EVs driving about.

Additionally, we aim to provide numerous high value datasets and analysis modules “out of the box” to lower the bar to entry for many planning tasks. For example, we provide users a normalized nationwide parcel-level land use “canvas” to create projects with. This means you can be up and running with parcel data for most cities in the United States in a few clicks!

And for the record, there is absolutely nothing on the technical side that precludes us from doing agent-based simulation -- we just haven’t focused on that yet. I’d personally like to build a feature which allows you to use simulation to produce scenarios as a starting point and then tweak them to your liking.

For MapCraft, I'm not up to speed on what it is now capable of. I am familiar with their cofounder’s previous work while at UC Berkeley. This is a good reminder for me to circle back on what MapCraft is up to - thanks! Also, if you’re a customer of theirs I’d love to hear how you think UrbanFootprint compares.

I'll have to leave questions about PECAS for someone else on my team as I don't personally have any knowledge/expertise on that one.

(Disclaimer: I'm the founder. Not meaning to steal UrbanFootprint's thunder, as it looks like a great tool, and it would be great to interoperate with them someday.)