I'm Kona Farry, a Seattle-area transit enthusiast with almost no prior software development experience who just wanted to see all the buses on a map...and got a little carried away.
I graduated from the University of Washington's Community, Environment, and Planning program in June 2020. I've worked in the City of Marysville's Parks, Culture, and Recreation department since 2016 as an A/V technician and event assistant, and interned in their Community Development department after graduating. I also worked at Trillium Transit building GTFS feeds for agencies around the country.
As of October 2021, I work as a schedule analyst at Community Transit, my local transit agency. My work in this role focuses on leveraging data from our AVL system, Hastus, and other internal and external sources to build and improve our service. Pantograph has no relationship with Community Transit.
For contact information, go here.
Pantograph was launched in March 2019 as the Puget Sound Transit Operations Tracker. At the time, my goal was simple: See all the buses in the area on a map. After being announced on the Seattle Transit Blog, the wide interest in the project blew me away, especially when my work was featured in The Seattle Times.
After the dust settled, Pantograph launched on iOS that August, with some backend revisions along the way. But I had built all of this as a new developer, learning how to code and build software as part of the project. As my skills developed, I began to prioritize maturing my infrastructure, which kicked into gear with the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in March 2020.
I used the newfound free time to begin overhauling the backend. A new API server powered by Express JS launched that spring, followed shortly by an overhauled Python server application (which loads data into Pantograph from transit agencies' servers). These improvements enabled expansion beyond just Puget Sound, beginning with Vancouver, BC and Portland, OR early that summer. The iOS app was rewritten along the way, and this website—launched in January 2022, built with Next.js—marks the end of the original stack.
The wonderful new logo debuted in January 2022, designed by Ana Simanca. You can contact her here.