Subject
44 entries
San Francisco
Bookmarks
Fran Sans: typeface from San Francisco's Muni Breda displays
The story behind Fran Sans, a typeface Emily Sneddon created from the LCD destination displays on San Francisco's Muni Breda light rail cars. An archival and design project born from a 3x5-grid modular letter system made for sufficiency, not style.
TIAT: The Intersection of Art & Technology (SF)
TIAT (The Intersection of Art & Technology) is a San Francisco gallery and coworking space for creative technologists — exhibitions, monthly salons, and studio access for artists working at the art-technology boundary.
Hoodmaps SF
Hoodmaps is a crowd-sourced neighborhood label map where locals annotate city areas with informal descriptors like 'hipsters,' 'rich,' 'suits,' 'tourists,' and 'sketchy.' More useful for understanding a city's cultural geography than official neighborhood boundaries.
SF Crosstown Trail
The SF Crosstown Trail is a 17-mile urban hiking route connecting Candlestick Point on the southeast to Lands End in the northwest, stitching together parks, neighborhoods, and green corridors across the city. A way to experience San Francisco on foot that most residents have never done.
Third Spaces in SF: Living Rooms and Commons
A Twitter thread compiling third spaces in San Francisco — the living rooms, commons, and informal gathering spots that aren't home or office. A crowdsourced map of SF's social infrastructure.
SFPD Traffic Enforcement: 45 Officers, 10 Tickets Per Day
SF Chronicle investigation finding that 45 dedicated traffic cops in San Francisco were issuing just 10 citations combined per day — a measurable accountability failure with direct public safety implications.
South Park Commons: The Modern Junto Club
Wired's profile of South Park Commons, a San Francisco community for technologists in transition — people between jobs, exploring new ideas, or building something new. Framed as a modern Junto Club where learning together precedes building together.
How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge Died
An investigation into why BART never crossed the Golden Gate Bridge — exploring the political and engineering decisions that shaped Bay Area transit for decades. A case study in infrastructure decisions and their long-term consequences.
Everyone on MUNI is Playing 2048
Ryan Orban tweet about everyone on MUNI playing 2048 — a personal observation from May 2014 San Francisco, when the addictive tile puzzle game was at peak virality.
Saturday Morning Cruise on the Bay
Personal tweet saved by Ryan Orban — a Saturday morning boat cruise around San Francisco Bay with friends. Personal memory from spring 2014.
Lumen: A Retro-Reflective City Bicycle — Kickstarter
Kickstarter campaign for the Lumen bicycle by Mission Bicycle Company — a retro-reflective city bike designed for urban cycling safety. Mission Bicycle was a prominent San Francisco custom bike brand.
How High Will San Francisco Rent Go? These Data Analysts May Have the Answer
PandoDaily's 2014 coverage of data analysts using rental listing data to forecast San Francisco rent trends — at the peak of the Bay Area housing crisis. An early example of applying data science methods to the hyperlocal problem of predicting neighborhood-level rent.
Tim Eller on Getting Your Hands Dirty With Data
Tweet from SFDataScience meetup capturing Tim Eller's point about the importance of working directly with data — the 'hands dirty' ethos that no algorithm knowledge replaces intimate familiarity with a specific dataset.
Happy Healthy Hungry: San Francisco Data-Driven Narrative
Jay Oh-en's 'Happy Healthy Hungry' IPython notebook — a data-driven narrative about San Francisco restaurant health inspections shared at the Zipfian Academy graduation. One of the early examples of a published, storytelling-oriented data science notebook.
Startup Data Science — Zipfian Academy Graduation
SF Data Science meetup for Zipfian Academy's graduation cohort featuring Tim Eller and Nick Elprin on startup data science. Zipfian was one of the first data science bootcamps; this event marked early community-building between the bootcamp pipeline and SF tech companies.
San Francisco's Secret DC Grid
IEEE Spectrum piece on San Francisco's hidden DC power distribution network — a legacy system from the early 20th century still operating underground. An unusual piece of city infrastructure that survived the AC/DC war.
A Wonderfully Simplified Map of San Francisco's Bicycle Infrastructure
Atlantic Cities piece on a simplified, design-forward map of San Francisco's bicycle infrastructure by John Metcalfe. The map prioritizes wayfinding clarity over geographic accuracy — in the tradition of the London Tube map.
Ryan @ FutureStack13
Ryan attending FutureStack13, New Relic's developer conference in San Francisco, October 2013. A touchpoint during the Zipfian Academy period — monitoring and observability were becoming mainstream DevOps concerns.
Winning! (Twitter photo, October 2013)
Ryan's 'Winning!' tweet with a photo, October 2013 — personal moment saved from Twitter during the Zipfian Academy period.
Ryan @ Dataweek SF
Ryan attending Dataweek SF in October 2013, just as the Zipfian Academy cohort was beginning. A week-long festival of data science events in San Francisco reflecting the field's growing community.
Evening of Design, Typography, and Tech
Personal photo from a design and typography meetup in San Francisco with @shashashasha (Sasha Greif), @somerandomdude (Chris Bowler/Nick Disabato?), and @stewf (Stephen Coles). Ryan received a book.
The San Francisco Rent Explosion
Priceonomics analysis of San Francisco's rent surge in 2013, showing SOMA as the most expensive neighborhood for a 1BR. Documents the housing cost inflection that accompanied the tech industry's concentration in the city.
Yelp Hipster Finder (SF Word Map)
Yelp's word map feature visualizing geographic density of the word 'hipster' in SF business reviews. A small data visualization curiosity that mapped subcultural geography through review language.
Wearable Technology at Chartio
Personal photo from a wearable technology gathering at Chartio in San Francisco, June 2013. Chartio was a BI startup; this was a community event around the early wearables movement, about a year before the Apple Watch announcement.
SF to San Jose Bike Route
A bikely.com route map for cycling from San Francisco to San Jose — saved as Ryan was planning a group bike ride down the Peninsula with colleagues. A personal logistics artifact from 2013.
Excellent Street Views: SF Planning Design Principles
SF Planning Department's 'Excellent Street Views' document — a guide to the design principles that make streets walkable and visually engaging. Covers building setbacks, facade continuity, street-level activation, and the visual corridor principles that distinguish human-scale streets from car-oriented ones.
Inequality & Mass Transit in the Bay Area
Dan Grover's interactive data visualization showing how transit access in the Bay Area correlates with income and geography — a 2013 example of civic data journalism that made structural inequality legible through maps and charts.
History of San Francisco Place Names
Noah Veltman's interactive map of San Francisco street and place name origins — each name linked to its historical source (a Spanish land grant, a Gold Rush merchant, a city founder). A civic history layer overlaid on the present-day street grid.
San Francisco Zoning: Needs More Density and Tall Buildings
Slate Moneybox arguing San Francisco should build more density and tall buildings — that zoning restrictions are the root cause of the city's affordability crisis. A 2013 piece that anticipated the YIMBY movement's core argument before it had that name.
Class-Divided Cities: San Francisco Edition
Atlantic Cities (now CityLab) analysis of San Francisco's class divide in 2013 — Richard Florida's data showing SF as one of the most economically bifurcated cities in America, with a shrinking middle class squeezed between a booming tech elite and a large low-wage service sector.
What's Underneath Those Brick Circles?
Burrito Justice's investigation into the brick rings embedded at intersections across San Francisco — remnants of the city's historic streetcar infrastructure. A slice of SF urban archaeology.
Sutro Tower — Google 3D Warehouse
A SketchUp 3D model of San Francisco's Sutro Tower in Google's 3D Warehouse — community-modeled landmarks for use in Google Earth and SketchUp. Part of the early crowdsourced 3D city model movement.
Bay Area Motorcycle Training — San Francisco Calendar
Bay Area Motorcycle Training's San Francisco course calendar — bookmarked for their MSF Basic RiderCourse. A personal reference bookmark for motorcycle license preparation.
Rebecca Solnit: Google Invades San Francisco
Rebecca Solnit's LRB diary on Google's presence in San Francisco — arguing that tech wealth and private commuter buses were displacing long-term residents and erasing the city's identity as a refuge for artists and dissidents. The essay that crystallized the tech-gentrification debate.
San Francisco Bay Bridge + 25,000 Algorithmically Controlled LEDs
Leo Villareal's Bay Lights installation on the San Francisco Bay Bridge — 25,000 algorithmically controlled LED lights turning the western span into the world's largest light sculpture. Launched March 2013; the algorithm produced a different display every night for two years.
OldSF: Historical San Francisco Photo Map
OldSF maps historical San Francisco photographs from 1850-2000 by location, letting you explore how any street corner looked across 150 years of the city's history. Saved with the hope of a Street View mashup.
With $2,000 Bikes, Tech Firms Flee Suburbs for City Homes
Bloomberg piece on tech companies relocating from suburban campuses to urban offices in 2012, attracting talent that preferred city living over suburban tech campuses. A snapshot of how San Francisco's tech scene was reshaping the city's geography and economy.
Bikesy: SF Bike Route Planner with Elevation
Bikesy was a San Francisco bike route planner that accounted for elevation — a key differentiator from Google Maps, which in 2012 didn't prioritize bike-friendly or flat routes. Ryan called it his new favorite website.
San Francisco Tech Boom Brings Jobs and Worries
NYT on the 2012 San Francisco tech boom — the influx of tech workers driving up rents, transforming neighborhoods, and creating visible inequality between tech workers and longer-term residents. An early document of tensions that would define the city's politics for a decade.
TacoConf 2012
Personal photo from TacoConf 2012 in San Francisco — an informal tech conference organized around tacos and bikes, emblematic of the playful, anti-corporate conference culture in the early SF tech scene.
Home from San Francisco, May 2012
Personal Path check-in at SFO returning home from a San Francisco trip in May 2012. A personal memory marker from a trip that included TacoConf and Maker Faire.
Only in San Francisco — SFO, May 2012
Personal Path photo at San Francisco International Airport with the caption 'Only in San Francisco!' — a personal memory from a May 2012 SFO transit.
Get It Now: Any Product Delivered In Less Than an Hour in SF
PandoDaily's coverage of Get It Now, a 2012 San Francisco startup offering any-product delivery under one hour — a precursor to the on-demand delivery wave that would produce Postmates, Instacart, and Gopuff. A document of when instant delivery was still a startup novelty.
The Pendulum Has Swung: San Francisco Office Market 2012
42Floors' 2012 blog post arguing that the San Francisco office market had shifted decisively back to landlord-friendly conditions after the post-2008 tenant's market — tech companies' rapid expansion had absorbed available inventory and pricing power had flipped. A snapshot of the SF tech boom's impact on commercial real estate.