As a veteran in the geospatial field, I’ve been fortunate to witness and contribute to the evolution of geospatial technologies over the past 10 years. My journey began in 2014 when I made several contributions to the first Mapbox Android SDK. In 2016, I co-founded Locus Social, one of the first real-time internet-scale geospatial analytics services. Later while at Grubhub, my team was among the early adopters of Deck.gl and GeoSpark. In 2022, I joined AWS as an engineering manager, drawn by the opportunity to grow the MapLibre community and leading Amazon’s contributions to this community.
Since then, I’ve had the privilege of leading several AWS initiatives to set a strong foundation for MapLibre’s growth. We’ve provided substantial financial backing, with sponsorships totaling $498K in 2022 and 2023, and we’re actively working on renewing our commitment for 2024. I’ve also guided internal Amazon SDEs in improving documentation and clean up broken dependencies, making the project more accessible to new contributors. Recognizing the community concern in using deprecated rendering API on Apple devices, I assembled a team of domain experts for the Metal migration last year. This year, I have retained everyone on that team and further contributed more than 20 major performance, stability, and maintainability enhancements to the native project. At the same time, I actively engage with Meta, Microsoft, Lyft, Grab, Toyota, and other industry leaders to jointly plan for further adoption and contributions.
Looking ahead, I see the potential for our renderers to become the most stable and performant map renderers available, effectively commoditizing the map rendering technology. My hope is to see MapLibre powering more maps rendered in browsers, phones, vehicles, and on any screens. I’m also excited about the prospect of our new map tile format replacing MVT and becoming the new standard for vector tiles. With all my personal views, however, I firmly believe that MapLibre’s future belongs to every community member. As part of the governing board, I see our role as laying the foundation that enables easy adoption, encourages contributions, and inspires and supports innovations from all corners of our community.
If elected to the governing board, my focus for the coming year would be on active listening and community engagement. I commit to speaking with one community member each week, ensuring that diverse voices and perspectives are heard and considered. I aim to connect common interests, facilitate the exchange of ideas, and help navigate diverging interests when they arise. Another significant part of my efforts will be dedicated to driving adoption, increasing contributions, and growing sponsorships to ensure the long-term sustainability and success of MapLibre.