show-mapper

mapping underground music shows in the bay area since 2014. see it here.

the list

https://shows.metasyn.pw was a project i started around 2014 to show where various venues are in the san francisco bay area. i had just moved to the city and remembered this cool site my cousin had showed me she called the list (maintained by graham spencer). the list has been around for quite some time, and does a great job listing a lot of shows in a pretty nice, simple, accessible format. like craigslist! interestingly, the list is actually just an html version of Steve Koepke’s excellent aggregation, which you can subscribe to here. there are a few other versions out there, like jon luini’s version here, or the mobile friendly version here. if you’re interested, you can read more about the history of the list. despite the multiplicity, none of them put the shows on a map. usually when i’m looking up shows, i know two things: when i’ll be free to go to one, and how far i’m interested in traveling. the map is useful for me since i often want to know about shows in a particular area in particular, especially when its more of an impromptu decision to go to one.

for a long time, i had manually entered all of the latitude and longitudes of various venues. this worked pretty well, and i’d just update the list of venues a few times a year. eventually this became unsustainable, and i figured out a way to semi automate looking them up with relatively reasonable accuracy. i think i could probably use more automation here, but i like to double check that the place is correct before mapping it.

parsing

in order to map the resources presented on the list, i wrote a small parser in rust. previously i had a cronjob that ran this, but finally decided to just make the parsing dynamic when accessing the map. this was actually my first time writing rust code, and turned me on to using the language. pretty fun.

years later (2023), i added parsing for 19hz.info, another lightweight site for finding local shows and music. they have a bay area page, so i parse that information as well and also try to plot it on the same map.

plotting

once we have a json list of shows to use - the site uses MapLibre. the first version was vanilla javascript, but poorly organized. sometime around 2017 i rewrote the whole thing in react, mostly just to learn react at the time, which i was sometimes needing to use at work. in 2023, i rewrote the whole thing to use vanilla typescript, which allowed me to vastly simplify the entire codebase and also get some type safety. its amazing how helpful simple type checking can be. i think the whole thing loads a lot faster now.

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