WildTrack Team New Interview Series #1: Nick Alteen

We’re thrilled to welcome WildTrack team member Nick Alteen as our first interviewee in this series! Nick is a Senior Service Delivery Engineer at GitHub.

It’s great to have you with us Nick, and we’re so grateful that you could take a few moments out of your busy day to share your thoughts on working with WildTrack!

What attracted you to working with WildTrack?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the big hype-train in technology. Everywhere you look, companies are leveraging AI to build some super interesting tools. It’s awesome to see the new ideas folks are coming up with! One thing that really stood out to me about WildTrack was how they are combining this revolutionary technology with deep, generational knowledge. An experienced tracker could look at a rhinoceros footprint and tell you more about it than I could sitting in the room with one (not that I would want to!) WildTrack contributes to the preservation of endangered animals as well as endangered knowledge.

You have been working to improve our current platform with several major revisions. What, in your opinion, is the biggest challenge in this situation?

Definitely trying to bring the best options to the table while challenging my own unconscious bias. If you were to ask a room full of developers how they would build and host a web application, each one would have a different answer. There’s a good chance they would have the same level of conviction, though! Whenever I start a new task, I like to spend a bit of time “rubber duck debugging” over the right way to approach it. That way I don’t just run with whatever works, and instead find an approach that is secure, scalable, and (hopefully) easy for someone else to understand later.

You came in as a contractor, but generously you donate some of your time to our mission too. We greatly appreciate this! Does it make your time on this project feel different in any way from a regular contract?

It 100% does! I try to set a very high personal bar for any of my work and, when it comes to a cause that is close to me, that bar gets even higher. In the past, any contract work I’ve done has always felt very transactional. The time I have spent working with you, Nico, and the rest of the WildTrack team has been much more collaborative and engaging. I appreciate that we’re able to throw ideas back and forth and build something really cool. I’m more than happy to keep contributing to WildTrack as long as I can.

If you could visit any of the WildTrack field projects, which would it be, and why?!

Is that an option??? Kidding aside, literally anything in Africa! I’d love to get an opportunity to see the wildlife there. One of my dream family trips would be to take pictures at Serengeti National Park.

If you could instantly create any new user feature for our platform what would it be?

WildTrack is on a great path, collecting the right information to really do some cool work. If I could turn any new feature on, it would be to add in human development and environmental changes as new datasets to start collecting and aggregating into the platform. As the platform grows, inevitably we’ll be able to build patterns and habits based on animal activity, but that might only be part of the story. How do industrialization and climate change affect these patterns? Can we make predictions/inferences based on this data? Over time, could this be expanded further to, say, include predicted changes as part of environmental surveys? Making sure we’re collecting the right information from the right places is the first step. I know that sounds more like a backend feature than a user feature, but it would definitely have an impact on end users too! Littering and illegal dumping are always a concern when it comes to endangered animals. If WildTrack had a way to report these types of findings, both within the application and externally to authorities, that would be another way we could help.

You have a young family so know that young kids are naturally curious about nature. How can we foster and grow that curiosity to protect our disappearing natural world?

Apathy is the killer of all things, figuratively and literally. Kids learn through our energy and enthusiasm. If we let apathy towards conservation grow, the next generation will do the same. That alone would seal the fate of our natural world. We as individuals and as a community need to show our kids the cool things nature has to offer. Many of us forget about the resources available all around us to foster this, even in busy cities. Libraries, gardens, zoos, backyards, and more! If our children grow up seeing us show respect and appreciation for the natural world, they can learn to do the same. It has the added benefit of being another way to remember our families and where we come from.

Nick and his family.