photo via draket, (CC BY-ND 2.0)

The search team wants to sing forth a confession:

🎵🎶We’re not awesome at everything, like everyone assumes.🎶🎵

There, we said it! WOW, that’s a relief! There is one thing we’ve been particularly not awesome about in the past: clearly articulating to our users the changes that have been regularly deployed to our hosted Mapzen Search service. Our new Release Notes page shows we’re much better at that now, but as with any problem, the first step was admitting we had one.

To give a bit of background, let’s quickly examine the current underlying framework at the core of Mapzen Search. We are continuously working on an open-source geocoding engine we lovingly call Pelias. Pelias is the collection of software modules that work together to turn text into map coordinates, and vice versa. Code is wonderful, and open-source code means everyone can see how the geocoding sausage is made. However, code alone is not enough to make the solution accessible, because not everyone can read code, or understand how to deploy that code on a machine. So to allow everyone equally easy access to what we’re building, we’re also hosting an instance of Pelias. That hosted instance is known as Mapzen Search, and all you need to leverage geocoding in your work is a free Mapzen Developer Account and a search api key, both of which can be obtained here.

Now back to our admitted problem of not effectively communicating every release. From this revelation came the creation of a new heading in our documentation, appropriately named, you guessed it, Release Notes. It’s a place for documenting changes in Pelias that roll out to Mapzen Search, any and every time changes are made. The changes called out in this high-level document are intended to inform users of our Mapzen Search service about changes they can expect to see. We promise to write them in plain English, and explain how the changes in our code will translate to an improved experience for our users, and our users’ users. Self-improvement efforts on the technical release notes for the underlying Pelias geocoding engine are still underway and we will report back soon.

We hope our new efforts in communicating more effectively will help our users have more insight into their favorite open-source geocoding service. We also hope it spurs conversation around functionality, as well as letting users discover new features as soon as they are rolled out, instead of finding them by chance months later in the documentation.

Please bookmark the Release Notes page and check in every week or so for exciting installments in the life of Mapzen Search.