After 5 years, I’m leaving Atlassian to take a gap year; and by gap year I mean a little travel, and a lot of time to explore hobbies, side-projects, and consulting in the space between software and urbanism.

Atlassian is a pretty special place to work. However as my friends have the unfortunate burden (and in my coffee fuelled opinion the excitement!) of hearing out, I’m burning up with ideas, and haven’t had the full capacity to triage, research, and execute on them. For every blog post I’ve written (see a wrap of my side-projects below), there’s 5 to 10 others I haven’t had the chance to explore. For the projects I do dig into, there’s been a limit to the scale of what I can build.

I’m currently working on a commercial collaboration contract looking at quantifying walkability (with fascinating improvements on anything I’ve seen done before) which I’m excited to showcase in the coming months.

If you have an interesting challenge in the urban analysis, community consultation, or planning space in the coming year that could use a software solution – and are looking for an ex-Atlassian full stack software engineer to scope and build it – get in touch. If you’re interested in hearing about solutions I build looking for problems to solve – before they’re ready to write about – also get in touch!

Otherwise, you’ll still catch me in the violin section of the Strathfield Symphony Orchestra, working with Better Streets and WalkSydney, in the waves, on my bike and of course – in a coffee shop writing plenty more here for you, dear reader!

Table of contents

The last 5 years at Atlassian

I’ll detail my technical achievements on my resume page, but I wanted to add a few other notes.

Not taking a gap year in 2020 was a brilliant idea in hindsight! I was fortunate to intern in 2018 under employee #40 and join full-time in 2020 after completing a degree and several internships. Beyond the perks it’s publicly known for (alongside Australian FAANG outposts) it’s been especially interesting to work at Atlassian – a leading tech company building collaboration products – through the transition from in person collaboration in 2020 to remote by default (and staying the course).

As a company that builds collaboration and project management products there’s a particular focus on dogfooding ways of working – so much so that some of these excellent resources are publicly exported in research backed exercises.

I’ve learned so much about building high quality software (at scale) from so many incredibly talented engineers, product managers and designers and I’d happily return there in the future.

The last 5 years of side projects

What else have I worked on in the last five years?

I finished a four-year project looking at the before and after impact of the new Sydney CBD light rail. I photographed the opening day of the new Drying Green park in the City of Sydney – an infill development of Green Square (and captured detailed 3D models) – along with the Sydney CBD swimming hole at Marrinawi Cove in Barangaroo.

I captured the moon touching the Opera House on a 600mm lens and the Metabolist masterpiece where the Kyoto Protocol was signed (which received almost a quarter million views).

I visited and mapped every single QMS advertising panel in the City of Sydney (leading to further analysis by Canva & ex. Google engineer Max Bo). I built tools for finding COVID vaccines during the acute shortage in mid-2021 which directly lead to 5,809 HotDoc booking referrals.

I visualised bus congestion utilising Marey charts – a cult favourite data visualisation technique – which are still niche enough my analysis is the 3rd Google result on the subject (spawning further writing on the technique). I’ve met proud urban planning consultants raise their 1983 Tufte book cover to the room when discussing it! I captured and shared takeaways from Australia’s first micro-mobility conference.

In an evergreen blog post that continues to receive mountains of traffic, I shared my technique of creating aerial imagery using commodity bike helmet cameras and OpenDroneMap, with significant interest from Mapillary (Meta) and inspiring future work by international geospatial engineers. I followed this up with utilising the LiDAR sensor in your iPhone to achieve similar results, using this in the vertical dimension to capture a never before seen slice of the beautiful escalator arrangement of Town Hall Station.

I dove deep into cycling advocacy. While I’m not aware of any impact, I’m extremely proud of my work documenting Canada Bay Council ripping out a cycleway paid for by taxpayers of NSW (likely, considering my audience, your money), rationalised by a dodgy engineering report the council later removed from their website. I went real deep – scouring the Internet Archive, spilling over 3000 words of digital ink dissecting the report that included analysis of point cloud data I constructed.

I utilised the rich bicycle data specification of OpenStreetMap (OSM) to programatically identify candidate streets for bicycle contraflow signage installation in inner Sydney, and continue to survey bicycle contraflow signage on OSM as the council implements it. Looking to gain an birds-eye-view of how bicycle riders experience infrastructure around Australia and the world, I generated detailed reporting of cycleway infrastructure for every council in Australia compared with worldwide examples (I was later told queries I wrote for this project were utilised for a commercial economic analysis report).

I compared the best bicycle routing apps (which use OSM, of course). I built upon fascinating work by speculative cartographer Dustin Carlino, writing a vector tileserver (from scratch in one afternoon) utilising JS bindings for the Rust osm2streets code (compiled to Wasm) to visualise per-lane street detail – which as Justin O’Beirne captured in April 2022, Google had not done so for any Australian city yet.

I began my long descent into the minutiae of traffic signal design and politics looking at how Sydney traffic signal operations adjusted during COVID. I became transfixed the more I learned and constructed a crowdsourced campaign to map experienced pedestrian delays by building Better Intersections – first in Sydney and now around the world. This project ripped across LinkedIn, became the subject of an ABC News article and has been linked from the Sydney Morning Herald.

A month later, I wrote a detailed explainer for a general reading audience (Shining a Light on the Traffic Signals of Sydney) looking at the complex design, policy and politics of Sydney traffic signals and how they are so important to our urban experience. This analysis started waves with traffic engineers, was shared as a “must read” in the Committee for Sydney newsletter in July 2023, and I continue to update the page as more practitioners share history and context. The open data my project collected enabled me to write an initial analysis with beautiful Observable Plot graphs, and highlight the insanity of a Sydney Metro trip taking less time between stations than crossing the road next to the entrance (sharing a side-by-side comparison video with my 61k YouTube subscribers).

Other projects didn’t make it into a blog post. I built basic tooling for improving the Signal to Matrix chat bridging experience (long before Signal was this cool!). I started a Matrix to ChatGPT Bot, which a contributor took over and grew into a userbase with 241 Github stars and over 220 PRs. I built an event planning app (with P3 colour space typography!) in the nascent days of Partiful (and long before Apple Invites) with bridged two-way Matrix RSVP integration. I built a basic dashboard with Observable.js charts of the UNSW Research Centre of Integrated Transport Innovation (rCITI) walking and cycling count data so it could be released publicly. I built tooling (at extremely short notice) to drive advocacy submissions at the Better Streets talk hosting Lee Waters, Clover Moore and Rob Stokes, generating templated email submissions for a user’s local council members in a low friction form. I wrote a basic council transcript generator and fzf-powered fuzzy search engine to keep track of what’s going on. And really early on, I built a simple Lambda transformer for TfNSW bus data for my Pebble smartwatch app (I’ve got a rePebble on order!).

With Better Streets, I wrote a detailed submission for the North Bondi Shops and Bus Terminus Upgrade, supporting change however compositing LiDAR scans and project docs in Blender to highlight flaws in the design (while referencing unimplemented best practice policies). I led the drafting and was the primary contributor for an even more detailed submission on the shocking TfNSW plans to add more lanes to Epping Bridge – while the project’s own engineering reports show an increase in vehicle traffic and that any travel time benefit to evaporate within decades.

I turned my eyes to the infamous Sydney Park Junction project, unpacking secret design changes announced in private, by omission, barely a month before shovels-in-the-ground after 7 years of planning. This blog post (which was the first the public learned of this issue), was later followed by two Sydney Morning Herald articles. Even after the Minister for Transport intervened due to community pressure, I found the project scope still wasn’t guaranteed, and by researching newly discovered documentation and writing up a detailed timeline I supported others uncovering extremely concerning allegations.

After some of this work I was nominated for the Committee for Sydney Young Sydneysider of the Year Award in June 2024 – I still don’t know who by!

All of the above were published as open source code or open data – and I contributed to OpenStreetMap some ~60,000 map changes over ~2.3k changesets since 2018.

I worked on these projects in my leisure time, on top of full time work at Atlassian (where I received a promotion in 2022), along with the usual things a twenty-something gets up to in Sydney!

I’m looking forward to seeing what I can get up to with an extra 8 hours a day.

The post 5 Years at Atlassian, and what’s next first appeared on Jake Coppinger.

Greenwich said the Gadigal people had used the site to fish, canoe and swim for thousands of years, and the opening of the new swimming hole was a win for community groups who had advocated for lifting the ban.

Sydney Morning Herald

I didn’t get a chance to take a dip on the “opening day” but I did cycle over after work.

Both articles reported that after this summer the government will consider adding decking or ladders at the site.

Also next to Marrinawi Cove is a cold outdoor shower among the sandstone blocks and grass, a very modern public toilet in an older building, and plentiful bicycle parking. See photos below.

Marrinawi is the Sydney Aboriginal word for large canoe, and was used to describe the vessels of the First Fleet into Sydney Harbour (Barangaroo Delivery Authority).

Planning history and local advocacy

The the winning proposal in the 2006 international design competition for the Barangaroo precinct, lead by Philip Thalis, proposed three ocean swimming pools. This plan has been modified beyond recognition as Clover Moore and others have written about in recent months (see “Barangaroo’s ‘phallic forest’ a monument to Sydney’s impotence”, Oct 22, Clover Moore, SMH ).

Matthew Moore wrote in 2009:

Within a day [after competition victory], [Phillip Thalis’] fears were realised when the agency in charge of the site, the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, advised the first job was to delete the three swimming pools they had proposed at the end of Millers Point, companions to the pool across the harbour at North Sydney. After the judging, Keating [former state premier] had no formal position but he was the man to whom the competition winners were sent to discuss the modifications.

Storming the headland, Matthew Moore, Sep 19th 2009, SMH

When the City of Sydney built Pirrrama Park in 2010 in Pyrmont, according to Clover Moore’s talk in 2021 its design allowed for swimming when it was legally and safely possible.

In 2019 the City of Sydney engaged Andrew Burges Architects to create concepts for swimming places in Sydney harbour to look at options for harbour swimming. This firm was also one of the designers of the Gunyama Park Aquatic and Recreation Centre in Green Square.

These are not firm plans, scoped and ready to go – they’re a visual representation of what’s possible, over time, if we can improve the Harbour water quality.

The treatment at Beare Park shows how short term, minimal intervention might look to get people swimming safely as soon as possible. 

Clover Moore, Team Clover website

Some renderings from https://architectureau.com/articles/making-sydney-harbour-swimmable/:

Yasmina Bonnet, Anne Warr, Tim Schwager and John Dunn from the Millers Point Community Action Group wrote a proposal on Jan 1st 2020 called Return To The Harbour for the Public Space Ideas Competition.

Our scheme is to reimagine Marrinawi Cove as a swimming spot for all to enjoy. Beautiful, sheltered and north-facing, native flora and carefully sculpted tessellated sandstone line the cove, extending along the headland.

A good current flows through this tidal cove, keeping the water clean and sparkling for swimmers. The scheme retains the naturalist beauty of the cove while gently inserting timber platforms and steps to allow safe access to the water. A shark net encloses the outer edge of the inlet.

Return To The Harbour proposal

In December 2020, Alex Greenwich (Member for Sydney) received a reply from Infrastructure NSW on his submission regarding the Millers Point Community Action Group Proposal “Project Billabong” for a local Barangaroo swimming spot. It stated:

Infrastructure NSW is in the early stages of exploring the opportunity for a swimming area at Barangaroo. Various locations and formats will form part of this review.

Letter from INSW to Alex Greenwich, Dec 2020

On May 30th, 2021 the Sydney Morning Herald published an article highlighting the advocacy of the Millers Point Community Action Group for a swimming place at this location, titled “‘Let us swim’: Push to bring back harbour bathing at Barangaroo”.

In October 2021, the City of Sydney Major Clover Moore addressed the Sydney Water Innovation Festival, stating the council’s ambition for harbour swimming.

The City has long had a dream for a clean, swimmable harbour and when we built Pirrrama Park in 2010 in Pyrmont, its design allowed for this possibility. Then in 2019, we commissioned an architect to examine options for creating a swimmable harbour – a dream the Covid pandemic has made more alluring. Indeed, there is strong community interest, especially from residents in the Pyrmont and Millers Point area.

Pirrama Park can be easily transformed given it has been designed into our existing infrastructure. But there are many sites that have potential, like Barangaroo and Rushcutters Bay. We also looked at potential designs for Beare Park and the Glebe foreshore. 

There is so much potential in having a swimmable harbour – from relatively simple swimming sites for locals, to the development of key harbourside swimming attractions for tourists and Sydneysiders alike. 

Clover Moore, Sydney Water Innovation Festival, 2021 (Transcript)

She also made it clear all the proposals rested on greater collaboration with Sydney Water and others to clean the Sydney Harbour water quality

This, of course, is dependent on improved water quality which we can make happen through our growing collaboration with Sydney Water.

If you have anything to add/correct on this timeline please comment below or email me at jake@jakecoppinger.com!

Facilities and more photos

I assume the shark net is to keep the bull sharks away.

The post Swimming in the Sydney CBD – Marrinawi Cove first appeared on Jake Coppinger.