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TL;DR We’re developing an open-source travel visualization app called MemoLanes. It’s currently in small-scale testing, and I recently switched from Fog of World to MemoLanes during a trip to Australia and New Zealand. If you’re interested in joining the internal testing, feel free to email me(zed@zijun.dev)! Project Link：https://github.com/MemoLanes/MemoLanes As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been pretty addicted to an app called Fog of World, and during 2021 and 2022, I spent quite a bit of my spare time developing a third-party extension tool called Fog Machine. Through this process, I picked up some knowledge about this domain and started forming my own ideas. It might just due to being a programmer, but I often find myself thinking about how I would design things differently, how I would implement the feature. I roughly formed this idea around April 2023, and it took me about a month to go from trying to come up with a name to giving up on naming it altogether (There are three hard software engineering problems: 1. naming; 2. cache invalidation; 3. off-by-one errors). Then in May, on a work trip to London, I created a folder with the weird codename ProjectDV on the plane and started designing the data structure and choosing the tech stack. After a bit over a year working on this part time, I kicked off small-scale testing around August this year. ...

TLDR Fog Machine: https://fogmachine.8bits.io/ Source code: https://github.com/CaviarChen/fog-machine Nonsense background story Late last year, a friend and I published the Fog machine project: A 3rd party Fog of World data visualizer/editor. It got more popular than I expected and I became more addicted to Fog of World since then. So I want to build more things. I’ve talked to multiple people about what they want and it seems that the most common things are: ...

Since entering Hong Kong in 2021 for my job, I didn’t make much progress in Fog of World. My daily life is mainly a straight line between work <-> home with a few hiking. I just went “moldy” by getting stuck here for so long (maybe also the crazy humidity here). My original plan was to have a long vacation and go back to mainland China early this year, but then there were giant covid waves in both Hong Kong and Shanghai. So the plan couldn’t work at all. Instead, the requirement for inbound travel to Hong Kong lowered, addition with my manager’s encouragement, project needs as well as wanting to meet a lot of coworkers, I decided to go for a business trip that includes 3 weeks in New York and 2 weeks in London[1]. ...

A couple of months after the previous episode: A data parser for [Fog of World], we finally released the first version of [Fog Machine], a web tool for visualizing and editing the data of Fog of World App. It is a joint work with @tavimori and this tool wouldn’t exist without the great help from him. To use [Fog Machine], visit: https://fogmachine.8bits.io/ The source code can be found here: https://github.com/CaviarChen/fog-machine Screenshots:

The source code can be found here: https://github.com/CaviarChen/Fog-of-World-Data-Parser I bought an app called Fog of World at the end of last year. I enjoy it a lot and dragged several friends into using the app. Actually, I knew the app and wanted the app when I was in high school. However, its price and the short battery life of mobile devices at that time stopped me. Now, I deeply regret that I didn’t get it earlier. There are so many places that I’ve visited before and there is no record. I am sure there will be some of the places I won’t go again and even forgot about being there. Also, I brought it during the pandemic, so I just cannot discover other countries for a while. Fortunately, China controls the local covid situation pretty nicely, I did do some traveling. ...

I actually don’t have the habit of writing blogs. I built the blog only because I brought the domain zijun.dev and didn’t want to waste it. After leaving the blog empty for over a year, I decided to renovate it and maybe write a blog about it. As a guy who is bad at and hate doing front-end stuff, there aren’t much things I can do. So I selected a new theme PaperMod and made some small modifications to make it looks a bit different (mainly the background). ...