I'm an open source enthusiast at Mapbox, the creator of Leaflet and 40+ other JS libraries, and a rock musician. AMA!

Thank you very much!

Leaflet is a very nice library that I've used on a couple of sites 👍

Thank you!

How did you get started in this area of combining geospatial and software development?

I just got lucky — worked for a generic software consultancy in 2008 when our company got a client from the mapping industry, CloudMade. Then I learned about OpenStreetMap, online maps, got excited, and it started from there.

Does it help to have an extensive GIS background when it comes to working with geospatial software?

It probably depends, but in my case, it helped a lot to NOT have any GIS background. This way, I could build a mapping library from a perspective of a total newbie, making it simple and easy to use for others too. You can hear more about my background with Leaflet and mapping in this video.

Do you have any advice for people who want to break into geospatial tech (like myself), especially from the perspective of building tools?

I'd recommend just jumping straight into building something, and learn along the way. Find a cool project idea that you'd feel enthusiastic to work on, and don't worry about having any knowledge gaps — practice is the most effective way to learn.

Or find an open source project to contribute to. I know contributing to popular projects can be intimidating, but you can start small — e.g. even just fixing typos in the docs could be a good gateway, and then you build from there.

The library came out of a website, suncalc.net, which I built more than 8 years ago and pretty much haven't updated since (you can tell by the fact that it still uses Google Maps :) — and I received so many wonderful e-mails about it over the years.

I got letters from imams who used it for optimal prayer times, from a Tibet monk who used it to plan lunches, from air conditioner installers, from people who used it when choosing a home / apartment to buy, and from many enthusiastic gardeners.

But the most endearing e-mail I got related to it is this one, and it warms my heart with joy and happiness:

❤️❤️❤️

This is a cool use of that project: atom.io/packages/sunset

I don't see Leaflet getting many new features — its whole point is to remain small, simple and lightweight, and given it's maturity, there's not much left to add. I'd actually be happy if we manage to remove some features. :) So the main focus would be on bugfixes, performance, refactoring it to make it even simpler, better docs, more examples, and more extensibility points for plugin authors. However, I won't be against taking Leaflet to a new direction if the community and its other maintainers decide that it's the right choice.

I definitely see an explosion in the adoption of 3D mapping technologies coming very soon. The two biggest limiting factors up till now were:

1. Technical limitations such as browser performance, computing power on a typical user's machine — those were pretty much solved. Browsers are now extremely fast, the unbelievably powerful APIs such as WebGL now have mainstream support, and most people carry unbelievable computing power in their pockets. And this change happened much faster than anyone anticipated.
2. The complexity of dealing with 3D — building easy to use software and APIs, implementing sophisticated visualization techniques, etc. This battle is still ongoing, and my colleagues at Mapbox are working hard to help bring those technologies to widespread adoption sooner.

Very happy to hear that, thank you!

Thank you!

1. Plugins getting out of date is a serious problem, but adopting maintenance of other projects is not something we can usually do, as maintainers already have a lot on their plate. We have to rely on the community to keep most plugins maintained. What I'd love to do in future is creating a better plugin registry, with easy search, GitHub stars, version compatibility indication, maybe a badge of quality, etc — maybe that would help attracting plugin contributions and adding an incentive to keep them up to date.
2. We might add rotation — there was even an attempt at this some time ago. It's just difficult to introduce rotation while keeping the code simple and easy to maintain, since it's a feature that affects most of the codebase. And there hasn't been enough demand for it to prioritize — usually rotation doesn't work well with raster maps (e.g. labels get upside down, etc.), and works much better in vector maps libraries like Mapbox GL.

It can be tedious indeed, and most papers are beyond my comprehension. So with practice, I learned to skim papers very quickly — e.g. go through abstract, conclusion, then scan the pictures, look for algorithm pseudocode etc. Now I can determine if a paper is worth reading into in more detail after a quick skim.

Kyiv is one of the biggest and fastest growing tech hubs in Europe, and one of the leading IT outsourcing hotspots in the world. Here's a good overview of the reasons, but I feel it comes down to two things:

• Affordable, heavily STEM-focused education system, with multiple world class universities in the city. While it can feel pretty outdated at times, it gives a very strong foundation (e.g. mathematics), which eventually produces many top-talent engineers.
• Abysmally low taxes, living and operational costs for engineers. It's very cheap to set up a startup team here compared to most other countries.

Kyiv is also a pretty comfortable, walkable city with lots of greenery, great food, awesome subway system, tons of coworking spaces.

The struggles are there too:

• A LOT of the top talent immigrates to Europe and US. Mostly due to corruption, inadequate government, bad social security and unstable economy. Hundreds of my Ukrainian ex-colleagues now live in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, SF & Bay Area.
• You'll find the diversity quite lackluster compared to the West — engineers are predominantly male, and there's a lot of gender bias (e.g. many people from the older generation think that girls don't need STEM education and instead have to find a husband and raise kids, cook and clean at home all the time). The situation is steadily improving every year though.
• Most of the tech scene is outsourcing — Kyiv is heavily lacking in product startups, although this gets better too.

WebGL is great for rendering large amounts of data, but is very difficult to use for actual processing and analysis. There are many research papers with geometric algorithms tailored for the GPU for massive parallelization, but pretty much no real implementations, and those algorithms use advanced APIs such as compute shaders, which are currently not available for WebGL and won't be for a while. Khronos is working on such an extension for the upcoming WebGL 2.0, but it will take a long time.

Quite a bit when working on map rendering and when implementing geometric algorithms, but nothing you can't catch up on quickly online — mostly basic vector and matrix math. The most advanced math concept I ever used in my 13-year career is function derivative, and only once — it was a very unexpected use.

I actually built a tool a while ago to be able to answer that question — it sorts organization repos by stars. :)

But since I'm involved with all my personal favorite ones, you can check out this list instead.

Thank you! I was just always upfront about it — if management asked me about how I see my career going forward, I'd always answer that I want to continue solving difficult engineering challenges, and not interested in management roles.

Oh, it's from my early student years when I considered myself a goth, wore a dark long coat and wanted to look all very grim, dark and mysterious. It stuck afterwards, and I like it. :)