In this installation of our interview series we talk to Derek Antrican who is the creator of the MountainProject Reddit bot. Derek also shares one of his memorable experiences from the Pacific Crest trail through-hike in 2015.
How did you get started?
I’ve been climbing for 10 years. I got started about 5 years before that when I took a climbing class in 8th grade (belaying, top rope, nothing really serious like beta/technique at that age). But it didn’t develop into a strong passion until I went to a college that had a decent indoor wall and a rock climbing community. In college I got into bouldering & sport climbing, and ventured into climbing outdoors.
What is your climbing routine like? Do you have a current project?
Currently, in COVID times, not much! But typically I’ll hit the gym after work a couple times a week and climb outdoors whenever friends are up for it. When it’s just me in the gym I’ll traverse until I miss a move and touch the ground, do a hangboard routine, climb up and down as many 5.10x as I can on the autobelays, and finish by sprinkling in a variety of pull up/sit up/etc exercises. I’ll typically save projects for a day when I’ve got a buddy to belay me.
Can you tell us a story from the Pacific Crest trail?
It’s hard to pick just one out of 5 months! There were a couple wildlife encounters like bears, bulls, and rattlesnakes, “trail magic” (usually when someone has left snacks for hikers), but the one that usually makes for good storytelling is when I almost collapsed from dehydration.
The PCT skirts around the Mojave desert in southern CA, but even the edge of the desert can be grueling. In late May temperatures were regularly over 110°F and there was rarely shade. At this point the trail was in a small ravine with a river being a 50ft drop below us. I had already camped with low water reserves, so I used some sparingly for breakfast, packed up camp, and headed out. The morning was pretty easy and cool so it wasn’t too bad when I ran out of water - especially since the trail eventually wound its way out of the ravine and down next to the river. I loaded up on water again, but hadn’t packed as much as I should’ve. By that time the sun was fully out and I was winding over hills - long past the river.
I went through my water too quickly and eventually ran out. All the stream beds I came across that *might* have had water, were dry. The only other people I could see were always just cresting the next hill ahead of me. This went on for about 3-4 hours when I was saved by the trail cresting another hill and revealing a lake. That night I was able to camp at a day-use area on the edge of the lake. Since that day, I always overestimate how much water I should carry.
Can you tell us about your Reddit Bot project? What motivated you to start it?
The Reddit bot has one main purpose: to answer those quick questions on climbing posts. I started it because so many “I climbed ______ this weekend” got comments of: where is this? what’s the grade? etc. I suggested the bot to the mods and they encouraged me to build it. Now the bot will attempt to reply to your post automatically (if it’s confident that it’s found a match), but it will also respond to MountainProject links and requests (eg “MountainProject Edge of Time”).
The biggest hurdle was getting started and learning how to build a reddit bot (especially in C#, when all the tutorials are in Python). After that the challenge was tweaking all the grade-matching expressions along with name and location searching to get a consistent high confidence in matches. I’ve experimented with machine learning to simplify this, but I don’t know enough yet to get really good results.
Do you have any advice for someone who wants to start an open source project?
For anyone who wants to get started programming, there are a million tutorials, but the best thing you can do is to “get your hands dirty”. Find a project you like (ideally a fairly small one if you’re just getting started), clone it, and start breaking it. Watch what happens when you remove or add to it, and you’ll start to understand how it works.
Back to climbing - do you have any favorite routes?
Red River Gorge, where I started climbing outdoors, and Miguel’s pizza will always have a special place in my heart. “Send me on my Way” is a classic that I love repeating there. Here in Washington I like “Prime Rib of Goat” (now just called “Prime Rib”), a 5.9 that was my first multi-pitch. A lot of great memories climbing with friends on that.
Can you tell us one lesson you have learned on your journey so far?
A couple of “mottos” have led me to how I approach life now.
Any repeated task can be automated, it’s just a matter of how difficult.
I love to build programs that simplify small (or big!) tasks like automatically categorizing my email, monitoring my 3D printer with Raspberry Pi/Arduino, or building programs for others to make their lives easier. Next time you find it painful watching someone do a task on the computer over and over, teach them a few keyboard shortcuts or even build them a program that will do it for them. xkcd.com/1205 is a great chart!
Don’t just write off ideas as “too difficult” or say “I wish someone else with the knowledge would build it”. Either take it bit-by-bit and learn it more and more as you go, or write it down and save it because you might come across it later and realize how much easier it seems to you.
As a senior in college I looked back on so many of the programming ideas I had as a freshman (when I was just learning to program as a hobby) and realized how easy they had become in just three years of gaining knowledge and experience.
Now I keep an ongoing list of project ideas. I know I will never get to all of them, but I love learning new things and the research involved in a brand new project.
Where can our readers learn more about your current project(s)?
Check out github.com/derekantrican to see what I’m currently up to. I also post my most popular projects on derekantrican.com/projects.