Alex did leave iNat earlier this month, and his impact on iNaturalist has been huge. We’re all incredibly grateful for his contributions, both in engineering and just as a human and teammate, and I’m looking forward to hanging out with him in the future and seeing what he’s up to next.
Regarding contacting engineers: engineering is a team endeavor, and the engineers are going to continue the work as a team as they always have. Alex was a huge part of computer vision and the geomodel on iNat, but it’s also been a team effort with contributions from multiple engineers. As the iNaturalist team as a whole has evolved, we’re working on more clearly defining roles, and the engineering team will focus on engineering rather than interfacing directly with the community in threads like this. We have an engagement team at iNat who focus more on outreach and community engagement, and we’ll be the points of contact between engineering and the community. On the forum that’s primarily going to be myself, @carrieseltzer, and @seastarya. We can relay concerns and feedback to product and engineering. That’s a lot of what I’ve been doing for nearly all bug reports and feature requests for the past 7+ years.
We just released the latest Computer Vision/Geomodel update and have decided to revert back to the GRID approach that was used previously instead of the SINR approach that we went with for the last few models, based on feedback and reports from the community (thank you!). You can read more in the latest blog post.