As a passionate advocate for open-source mapping software, I’m committed to driving MapLibre’s mission forward. After the license change, I proposed community to get together under MapLibre name, co-founded our organization, set up OpenCollective, did the initial re-branding and CI automation of the code.
My Accomplishments This Year
- I organized, found funding, and continue to drive the new MLT tile format initiative that showed up to 6x size reduction compared with MVT! (video presentation). Special thx to @mactrem!
- I on-boarded and greatly improved Martin - one of the most popular tile server supporting sources like Postgres, MBTiles, PMTiles, Sprites, and Fonts. On GitHub, 2,100 :star2: and rapidly growing!
- I coordinated the transfer and on-boarded Maputnik - map style editor
- I frequently present and do workshops about MapLibre at the conferences. This year: FOSS4G EU (+workshop), State of the Map (OSM-US), and plan to attend FOSS4G in Belem.
- I am constantly in communication with community members and sponsors, making sure to hear concerns and community issues.
- I regularly attend monthly sync-ups with the technical steering commeetees (navigation, native, web, and MLT)
- I was actively involved in finding the next coordinator to continue the amazing work done by @wipfli
My Mission Statement
I believe MapLibre should offer a complete mapping software stack — “from bits to pixels”: given data, the stack should offer a clear path to convert it into tiles, serve tiles to the world, visualize them with MapLibre web / native / rs, and offer extra functionality with plugins (like navigation), as well as style editing and other tooling. The list goes on.
Yes, but what about next year? I believe MapLibre must have three fundamental goals:
- Grow developer community
- Maintain and improve existing code
- Research next-generation stack with latest technology (WebGPU, faster tiles, multi-platform, …)
All three goals are important - without the community we won’t be able to maintain a vast codebase. Without investment into the next generation technology, we will quickly become irrelevant.
A little more about me
- Volunteer Wikipedia core developer since 2005, implemented API and bot frameworks. Later worked for the foundation building Maps and data viz.
- Built Sophox OSM Sparql index and other OSM tools and libraries
- Contribute heavily to the Rust ecosystem, including the compiler/libraries
- Former principle engineer at Elastic (ElasticSearch), now working at Rivian (EV cars need good maps!)