I've tried to make this thing work, but it doesn't and turns out I'm not alone.

I've actually left Tap running overnight in Collection Signal mode and nothing got synced. I've also tried to add repos and then add some records and no events were received. Plus all the points that @danabra.mov already mentioned. There's no way to debug or understand what is happening with Tap.

Tried Tap, but events and backfilling is extremely slow. @atproto.com @bsky.app any good guides on the topic? Trying @atproto/sync package now, feels better, but still rather slow.

For my app I'm trying to set up Firehose consumer so that newly added/deleted geo places were synced to my DB. I also need to backfill the data that is already existent in Atmospehere.

In fact they've invented the whole toponymics system on top of already perfectly functional Open Location Code system just to prevent anybody from utilizing the existing Google's geo data.

I've yet to find a Plus-code-to-coordinates converter that can parse anything from Google Maps.

So without 'London' part it's impossible to locate the pin precisely. So if you copy the code, you won't be able to locate the place anywhere outside Google Maps, because who knows which toponyms they use in there 🤡

Trick is that in Google Maps place's Plus code is shorter than it should be according to their own spec. Should be 8 chars before +, but it's just 4 chars plus city or area name, 'London' on the screenshot above.

You can get Plus code of a place from the sidebar though. Plus code is Google's invention:
github.com/google/open-...

and is basically same longitude and latitude, but encoded.

Yesterday I've researched how I can get exact longitude and latitude of a place (like a cafe) from Google Maps and looks like it's impossible. There's no way to retrieve it in a convenient way. Well, obviously it exists in Google Place API, but it's not very free.

Cool story time on Google Maps in a 🧵

Also one of the main goals is to build the whole thing with (mostly) AI – I will code some things by myself here and there, but in general I hope to vibe code it. Architecture is on me, of course. Now I am spending more time on thinking about how different parts should work together.

First of all, it will be geo-based app, it might get geographical and I will probably be messing with maps and different geo apis, etc. Never had experience with this, so an exciting new world for me.

So, I got curious about AT protocol and now building kind social app based on it. Will be occasionally posting about the journey here.