Hack Meetup: Building a Better Porchfest Map · boston

Stream: boston

Topic: Hack Meetup: Building a Better Porchfest Map

Dave Hanft (Jan 16 2026 at 01:49):

I would propose "Hack Meetup: Building a Better Porchfest" to honor the source of the inspiration

Dave Hanft (Jan 16 2026 at 01:58):

"PorchREST" would be a great name if you built out an API. Just sayin haha

Dan (May 09 2026 at 15:30):

The Bluesky folks in Boston are putting Porchfest on the "Atmosphere" (analogous to the Fediverse):

https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:pqerwmnouevyltxyoayhholf/post/3mlge5zvv2k2a

Dan (May 09 2026 at 15:31):

They have events and maps built into the system I guess. Atmosphere is pretty nice but of course it's somewhat more centralized. They're in an interesting middle zone.

Dan (May 09 2026 at 15:32):

I guess they already have "multi-events".

It's so much easier to sell a company on making an integration. Bluesky has a bunch of users. Things are automatically compatible. It's pretty nice. It bothers me because I prefer the Fediverse :sweat_smile:.

Dan (May 09 2026 at 15:35):

There's also this unofficial Somerville Porchfest map:

https://www.porchfest.io/

Philip Durbin (May 09 2026 at 17:53):

There's also https://viewporchfest.com which I heard about at https://omny.fm/shows/wbz-newsradio-1030-news-audio/attending-somerville-porchfest-interactive-map-might-help-you-plan

It also says it's powered by Atmosphere.

They interview the creator about it. The transcript says "Tim Sakaroff" but I wonder that's a misspelling and if it's this guy: https://www.timsakharov.com

Dan (May 09 2026 at 18:50):

Huh.

Dan (May 09 2026 at 18:51):

Okay well that sort of covers our use case. Not sure the usability on the run is what I'd want.

Dan (May 09 2026 at 18:53):

Oh wow I think this is coincidentally a different Atmosphere.

Dan (May 09 2026 at 19:56):

Well I'm gonna use viewporchfest. I have an hour and change to kill before my Amtrak home :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Dave Hanft (May 09 2026 at 21:11):

Philip Durbin said:

There's also https://viewporchfest.com which I heard about at https://omny.fm/shows/wbz-newsradio-1030-news-audio/attending-somerville-porchfest-interactive-map-might-help-you-plan

It also says it's powered by Atmosphere.

They interview the creator about it. The transcript says "Tim Sakaroff" but I wonder that's a misspelling and if it's this guy: https://www.timsakharov.com

Well it seems like everyone and their sister is building porchfest apps now haha

Philip Durbin (May 11 2026 at 07:31):

Dan said:

Oh wow I think this is coincidentally a different Atmosphere.

A different one? I've never even heard of it.

Dan (May 11 2026 at 14:46):

Seems like it. There's the name (or nickname?) for the ecosystem around BlueSky, and there's what appears to be some sort of company making a platform for events (such as Porchfest here). I'd never heard of the latter either.

Philip Durbin (Jul 25 2026 at 15:18):

So are we still thinking of building any porchfest maps? Brookline Porchfest is on Sep 26th: https://www.brooklineporchfest.org

Philip Durbin (Jul 25 2026 at 15:26):

A possible direction:

Make a repo at https://github.com/bostonopen/porchfest
Make directory: brookline
- Make directory: brookline/2025
  - Vibe code something based on the 2025 KML: #boston > Hack Meetup: Building a Better Porchfest Map @ 💬
- Make directory: brookline/2026
  - Wait for the KML to be published
  - Make a 2026 version based on the 2025 version

Dan (Jul 27 2026 at 01:37):

Did the ATProto people end up coming up with something?

Philip Durbin (Jul 27 2026 at 01:45):

Well, there's https://www.porchfest.io and https://viewporchfest.com and yes, at least one of them was done by ATproto people. @Tynan Purdy would probably know. I don't know if either one is open source.

Tynan Purdy (Jul 28 2026 at 15:12):

some stuff was made but hasn't moved in a bit afaik. For sure some of my folks would be interested in working together on it if y'all want to do it. We sketched out a data model to put it on atproto and someone made a client that just has manual data on a map at https://porchfest.at

Dave Hanft (Jul 28 2026 at 22:58):

It seems like there a lot of new apps that have emerged. I think the hard part is getting sponsorship / “official app” status. @Philip Durbin do you know what the plan is for Brookline?

Philip Durbin (Jul 29 2026 at 00:41):

I should probably try to figure out who's in charge and contact them.

Philip Durbin (Jul 29 2026 at 00:42):

I've been assuming they'll just use Google Maps and produce a kml file, like last year.

Tynan Purdy (Jul 29 2026 at 15:19):

and code for boston is willing to facilitate the project if we get a community org partner like one of the porchfest organziers

Philip Durbin (Jul 30 2026 at 01:59):

@Tynan Purdy cool, I went to one of their meetups years ago but I thought they only worked on political projects.

Tynan Purdy (Jul 30 2026 at 02:00):

they focus on public good and open source stuff with a community stakeholder which often manifests in using public data in some useful way for a government site

Tynan Purdy (Jul 30 2026 at 02:01):

I just realized the title of this thread. are yall planning a meetup date to build this?

Philip Durbin (Jul 30 2026 at 02:02):

No, we haven't planned anything formal. Just informal hacking. :smile:

@Dan any insight on why https://pdurbin.github.io/a-better-porchfest/ is throwing errors now?

https://github.com/pdurbin/a-better-porchfest is the same as https://github.com/orblivion/a-better-porchfest except that I I set up GitHub Pages on it. I figured it would be a good starting point. I'd fork your repo over to the bostonopen org.

Tynan Purdy (Jul 30 2026 at 02:04):

we could certainly put together an event for it. I recently got in touch with cambridge hackspace and they are open to hosting things with us

Philip Durbin (Jul 30 2026 at 02:06):

how many cooks do we want? :crazy:

Philip Durbin (Jul 30 2026 at 02:09):

Here's a pic from the last time we hacked on the porchfest map:

From #boston > 2025-09 meetup @ 💬

Tynan Purdy (Jul 30 2026 at 02:10):

so true lol. but it can be broken up into parts. we need a festing experience, a fest prep experience, a planner experience, backend, data model

Tynan Purdy (Jul 30 2026 at 02:10):

throw in a web and native app

Tynan Purdy (Jul 30 2026 at 02:10):

room for plenty of line cooks

Philip Durbin (Jul 30 2026 at 02:11):

Well, like I say, I'm inclined to use @Dan's https://github.com/orblivion/a-better-porchfest as a starting point.

Philip Durbin (Jul 30 2026 at 02:12):

He did a nice writeup here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielkrol_last-sunday-i-organized-a-small-afternoon-activity-7378245073555050496-m4lF/

Philip Durbin (Jul 30 2026 at 02:13):

"Organizing any type of event like this is always more stressful than my fantasy scenario where everyone "gets it" right away and we're off to the races and get the whole thing done in three hours." :smile:

Tynan Purdy (Jul 30 2026 at 02:14):

I take extreme offense to being directed to the linkedin[dot]com domain

Tynan Purdy (Jul 30 2026 at 02:15):

but yes all good points

Philip Durbin (Jul 30 2026 at 02:17):

I only post on LinkedIn when I take a big trip for work. :smile:

Tynan Purdy (Jul 30 2026 at 15:29):

pull up tonight I can help you set up a blog on the atmosphere :wink:

Dan (Aug 08 2026 at 19:35):

Let's bring this up in tomorrow's meeting

Dan (Aug 10 2026 at 00:45):

Philip Durbin said:

No, we haven't planned anything formal. Just informal hacking. :smile:

Dan any insight on why https://pdurbin.github.io/a-better-porchfest/ is throwing errors now?

https://github.com/pdurbin/a-better-porchfest is the same as https://github.com/orblivion/a-better-porchfest except that I I set up GitHub Pages on it. I figured it would be a good starting point. I'd fork your repo over to the bostonopen org.

Looks like maplibre upgraded and turned into a module import only. Openfreemap actually pins it at version 5 in their example now (not sure if it was before). So do that and it'll get over that hump.

<!-- Maplibre GL -->
<link href="https://unpkg.com/maplibre-gl@5/dist/maplibre-gl.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<script src="https://unpkg.com/maplibre-gl@5/dist/maplibre-gl.js"></script>

Philip Durbin (Aug 12 2026 at 02:32):

I just added a "Play" button. Try it! Try it!

Dan (Aug 12 2026 at 12:20):

Was the slider there before?

Dan (Aug 12 2026 at 12:20):

Play button could perhaps be useful if you want to see if there is a trend for location of gigs

Dan (Aug 12 2026 at 12:21):

Oh and you imported the data looks like.

Dan (Aug 12 2026 at 12:22):

Wow it's really slow to load the map for whatever reason.

Dan (Aug 12 2026 at 12:24):

Well if openfreemap is slow I could help you self-host the map. (Something I've been doing for my job for a few months)

Dan (Aug 12 2026 at 12:24):

I'm going to guess a few megs for all of Brookline.

Philip Durbin (Aug 12 2026 at 22:10):

Huh, it's not especially slow for me.

Philip Durbin (Aug 12 2026 at 22:11):

No, I added the slider.

Dan (Aug 13 2026 at 13:16):

To be clear I mean the underlying map is slow to load. The markers are fine.

Dan (Aug 13 2026 at 13:17):

So maybe openfreemap is slow. Or maybe my browser has an issue with it.

Adrian (Aug 13 2026 at 22:40):

Wasnt openfremap having load issues with the real world r/place clone a while back? I wonder if theres throttling as an anti bot measure or something

Adrian (Aug 13 2026 at 22:41):

Their tech stack is cool tho "There is no tile server running; only nginx serving a Btrfs image with 300 million hard-linked files. This was my idea; I haven’t read about anyone else doing this in production, but it works really well. (You can read more about it on GitHub.)"

Philip Durbin (Aug 13 2026 at 23:59):

@Dan slow on mobile only? I've been testing on desktop only.

Philip Durbin (Aug 14 2026 at 02:10):

What do these shapes and the gradient mean to you? :smile:

Philip Durbin (Aug 14 2026 at 02:10):

No fair looking at commit messages!

Adrian (Aug 14 2026 at 20:01):

as someone who barely knows what porchfest is, I dont know (and its taking me too long to guess)

Philip Durbin (Aug 15 2026 at 11:47):

The circle gets wider for each additional band at the same porch. In this dataset, the most bands any porch has is four.

Darker blue means more total time you'll hear music at that porch.

Dan (Aug 27 2026 at 13:08):

I'll try it on laptop to see if it's faster.

We could also self-host the tiles if we really want, I have experience in that now :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:. It really wouldn't be much disk space just for one town like that.

Dan (Aug 27 2026 at 13:31):

Yeah it's a little faster on laptop. Not blazing.

Dan (Aug 27 2026 at 13:32):

It's pretty fast.

Philip Durbin (Aug 28 2026 at 00:59):

I need to get it working on mobile.

Philip Durbin (Aug 28 2026 at 01:03):

Self hosting sounds interesting but I'm probably too cheap to pay for a server, beyond the $4 per month I pay for a Digital Ocean droplet, I mean.

Dan (Aug 28 2026 at 01:46):

Well you're hosting a JavaScript file and HTML etc. Do you have very limited space for assets?

Philip Durbin (Aug 28 2026 at 01:49):

I'm using a lot of my 10 GB already:

pdurbin@server4:~$ df -hl
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs            46M  1.1M   45M   3% /run
/dev/vda1       9.6G  7.2G  2.4G  76% /
tmpfs           228M     0  228M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
/dev/vda15      105M  6.1M   99M   6% /boot/efi
tmpfs            46M  8.0K   46M   1% /run/user/1000