I am Stefan Karschti and I’m honored to be serving on the MapLibre Board.
My background is technical, and worked in mapping for over a decade, starting at Skobbler where I co-architected core native components, the rendering engine, and an efficient vector tile format that powered rendering, routing, search, and guidance. I also have extensive experience in OSM map processing. After Skobbler’s acquisition by Telenav, I focused on automotive navigation and map making, bringing OSM-based maps to embedded in-car systems. Currently I’m contracting for Grab, where I’ve supported the adoption of MapLibre and future adoption of MLT.
In MapLibre Native, I have contributed:
- Renderer rearchitecture and Metal backend – implementation work as part of the Amazon-sponsored team, enabling native Metal rendering on Apple devices and improving performance.
- Font rendering – integrated Grab’s font rendering improvements and implemented font fallback (
font-faces) support in styles. - Various cross-platform fixes and code reviews.
Vision:
- Modularity and maintainability through the Plugin API implementation: minimal Core + plugins architecture that would turn layer types, style parser, tile loaders (and more) into dynamically loadable plugins.
- Expand platform reach and strive to achieve GL JS to Native feature parity. Help drive Globe, terrain PoC implementations in Native as plugins.
- Improve performance and reduce resource consumption to support a wider range of devices, including lower-end mobile phones.
- Drive greater MapLibre adoption across industries and applications, including automotive and offline use cases.
Disclosure: Self-employed, contracting for Grab. MapLibre work has been volunteer-based except for Amazon- and Grab-sponsored contributions.