Travel, Photos, Art?

Published on Dec 9, 2013 (updated Aug 27, 2014), filed under adventure, design, photography, art. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon.)

I started another side project. It’s about taking a ton of photos of street scenery, hoping for Google+’s Auto Awesome to latch on, using GIMP if not, and putting the results up on Tumblr. On the one new travel tumblr art installation that I call Animated Traffic.

It’s actually a bit more work than it looks like—for one because of Google+’s mysterious ways of deciding what photo sequences to animate and because of the sometimes random order it puts photos in (notice how some traffic flows backwards), and for another because of peculiarities on Tumblr’s end, where you can’t post GIFs natively and which has just been new territory for me. Similarly, every animation requires some optimization (histogram, dimensions, compression) as they’re heavy—even post-optimization, each image weighs an average 2.25 MB.

In any case, I’ll use this Tumblr as a playful way of covering my world travels and to experiment a bit with GIF animations. Who knows what else I come up with. I deem a couple of posts per week realistic, so if you like it, this way please.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager at various companies (e.g., Google); I’m an active web and tool developer (code optimization, digital defense), a contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and a book author (O’Reilly, Frontend Dogma).

I love trying things—in web development and engineering management, but also in politics and philosophy, where I hold to one idea in particular: that we can only be well if we take good care of everyone. Here on meiert.com I talk about some of my perspectives and experiences. (Interpret charitably but be critical—and share feedback and advice that makes my work better.)