As I've aged and grown as a data engineer/scientist, unsurprisingly, it has become much rarer that I encounter something new that seems like magic (ie is something with functionality that expands my understanding of what is possible), but through new hobbies or explorations into new fields, I continually discover new and exciting uses of technology that adds neat functionality to my life.

For example, maybe a year or two ago, my wife started getting into bird watching, which introduced me to the Merlin Bird Id app [0], which (using my location, the date, and audio from my phone's mic) identifies the birds around me on walks. I can walk around and get mostly accurate identifications that help me better understand a complex and rich facet of the world that I had mostly ignored before! Super cool!

Another tech thing I recently learned a lot about that got me excited: I was playing around with a personal project to produce safer bike routes and I finally dug into OpenStreetMap [1, 2]. I had been aware of OSM for a long while, but taking this project on led me to look for a source for freely available route segment data that I could collect and use to build upon, and I found OSM was perfect for this. Digging into the source, I discovered it's essentially a Wikipedia-esque project (a triumph of the human species) where anyone can contribute edits to maps and they're immediately published worldwide! I was and remain very excited about this project.

When I just stay in my technical lane, I get desensitized to the cool stuff people are doing (which becomes hard to find in our ecosystems that have sold our attention to the highest bidders), but when I go out looking, people are still doing exciting stuff.

[0] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap

[2] https://www.openstreetmap.org