Last month, I happened to meet Terence Eden at BarCamp London, a revived post-corona tech meeting. Mr. Eden, a prominent figure in the British technology industry, was on hand to help organize this popular unconference. The last topic he spoke on was British geolocation company what3words. For those who aren’t familiar, what3words pioneered a clever way to represent exact locations on maps. “The world he divided into three-meter squares, and to each square he gave a unique combination of three words.”Currently, it operates in 193 countries, including the United States.
Eden’s initial criticism of what3words in 2019 was wide-ranging, including lack of openness, cost, and “no way to translate between languages” from a developer perspective. I honestly expected this old topic to slip through his mind. Probably by now, a big company had adopted what3words, and he was working for a small consulting company that leveraged the old solution and created an open source version. To my surprise, he answered without pause: “They’re burning money.”
So let’s backtrack a little bit.
Well, what3words is a perfectly useful system and the idea is simple enough. Instead of long floating point geolocation data, we divide the world into 3 meter by 3 meter grids and assign each one a unique 3 word address.
I am writing from a place called “///little.march.dare”. So if something worse were to happen and I was stuck under some rubble and couldn’t move and answered the phone, I could say these three words to anyone and they would call the emergency services and come to my rescue. It will be given to you. My editor said he uses it to make his address clear to couriers.
However, a summary of the system’s problems identified by Eden et al. is as follows.
- The built world is not flat, but what3words does not have height information.
- Relaying three English words is itself highly susceptible to transcription errors. Otherwise, the game we were playing with Whisper Chains wouldn’t have been so unpredictable. Homophones are a particular problem in English.
- I guess my phone already knows my geolocation. Wouldn’t this be the most efficient way to transfer my location?
- If each section is a completely different code, two sectors could be next to each other, but I don’t know about that.
- If this is being used by emergency services, shouldn’t governments own this so they can create the best word lists for them? Currently, geocoding algorithms have not been scrutinized. not.
I’m pretty sure that unless it pivots, what3words will only find narrow use with couriers (they already have some deals in place). However, this post is about how senior developers help organizations and startups by addressing problems and evaluating new technical solutions.
Developer’s perspective
So imagine for a moment that the above problem is in front of you. How should you and your team respond?
Senior developers should always support the current solution, but they also need to implement improved options to give the company a chance to grow. A corollary of this is that you also need to communicate to your stakeholders where you think a particular solution is going.
Once you’re part of a company, you need to accept that a closed source solution may be the best fit for your company, but you should also give careful consideration to the alternatives. Open sourcing is not a purely financial route, but it has the potential to transform a company’s position. This allows for large-scale innovation and the adoption of ideas that might otherwise be worse off. On the other hand, originating companies can provide consulting and ecosystem plays. Development teams can outline the technical skills needed to move in that direction without getting lost in licensing models and value propositions.
For what3words, you don’t need to filter for homonyms, you should at least use AI to identify them. By allowing what3words to accommodate local language variations (while still pointing to the same location), the words used can all be unique. There are many words that are said differently depending on where you come from, and some of them sound more unique than others. This makes sense, as the people responding to your requests, whether urgent or courier, are also likely to be local. This means opening the solution to locale experts.
Adding height is part of extending a simple solution to work in a more complex real world. Height may be best addressed by combining alternative solutions (building area solutions or Ordnance Survey maps). Again, this likely means opening up a backend so that the API can examine the geolocation and combine it with other information.
Back to actual what3words for a moment. Of course, we also have an API to convert from words to numerical latitude and longitude GPS coordinates and vice versa.
https://api.what3words.com/v3/convert-to-coowned? Words=filled.count.soap&key=[API-KEY]
https://api.what3words.com/v3/convert-to-coowned? Words=filled.count.soap&key=[API-KEY] |
and
https://api.what3words.com/v3/convert-to-3wa? coordinates=51.521251%2C-0.203586&key=[API-KEY]
https://api.what3words.com/v3/convert-to-3wa? Coordinate=51.521251%2C–0.203586&key=[API–KEY] |
Please note that attempts to reverse engineer the backend by brute force can be tricky and easily detected.
I think the fact that adjacent regions have completely different words makes it a poor solution, but I still think it’s a good solution. complementary Solved. This also makes it easier for other tools to manipulate your geolocation strategy. For example, this concern would be alleviated if emergency services receiving two what3word locations could immediately know that they are geographically close. How would this be expressed technically?
The focus here is not on treating all problems as something that software engineers can solve, but on presenting the options along with their technical implications so that all stakeholders can fully evaluate them. There is something to do. Some align with other business endeavors, while others are easily rejected based on other experiences. From the casual analysis above, it appears that many issues can be addressed by changing the closed nature of the backend, but this requires full buy-in from the enterprise. In summary, as Arnold Schwarzenegger says in the title of his new book, technical teams need to be “helpful.”
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