Brad Leege

I'm excited to announce that I've moved my blog from Tumblr to a new standalone Web site: http://leege.io

Come join us next week at Science Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus as I team up my fellow Mapbox Badger alums and friends to present a hands-on workshop about working with open source geography tools. We'll be covering a range of topics from OpenStreetMap, Javascript and the Web, building Mobile apps, and working with PostGIS. Please bring questions and a laptop. I look forward to seeing you there!

Making a travel map using Mapbox Studio is incredibly fun and surprisingly quick to do. I was able to create this map in less than 2 hours this afternoon by tweaking the stock Mapbox Dark style to remove visual clutter (Roads, City Names, Buildings, etc). From there I uploaded a GeoJSON file that contained the US States outlines and names. To finish it off I used the built it Data Filter tool to select the states that I've visited in order to color them blue. To explore the map yourself it's availalble at:

http://bleege.github.io/statesvisited/

If you're interested in making your own maps like this checkout the "Make a choropleth map with Mapbox part 1: create a style with Mapbox Studio" step by step tutorial. It provides a great intoduction to the power and simplicity of the Mapbox Studio platform.

This past week I was excited to celebrate my first anniversary as a full time member of Mapbox! It's been a fantastic experience where I've been able to learn many new things and gotten to explore cities that I previously hadn't spent much time in. My favorite part by far though has been getting to meet and more importantly getting to know a great group of people. This is simulateously the most empathetic, good humored, and smartest group of people that I've ever worked with. It's the combination of these traits that makes possible what we have been able to achieve together.

Speaking of which, it's hard to believe but in just this one year we:

Built and released mobile vector mapping SDKs for iOS and Android

Released Mapbox Studio for WYSIWYG vector map styling and design

Grew the mobile team from 3 to 8 people

Partnered with Twitter on Twitter Fabric

Partnered with NVIDIA to use the Mapbox Android SDK in their DRIVE PX 2 platform announced at CES 2016

Supported Nepal Earthqauke Relief crisis mapping and fundraising

All in all, it couldn't have gone better from my perspective. I'm incredibly grateful to be part of this team and to the people who helped get me here.

Mapbox is a flat, decentralized organization with no org chart nor officially defined responsbilities. It's also made up of team members distributed across the globe with roughly equal numbers working in 1 of 4 physical offices as well as remotely from home offices. To many people this type of environment may seem like chaos and impossible to build anything, none the less actually ship a major product. I disagree. Mapbox Mobile could only have been built in this environment.

Mapbox Mobile is a product that is encompasses many different technologies, features, designs, and philosophies. There is no one city nor region in the world that could source the necessary people with the backgrounds and experiences needed to pull this off.

The keys to making this all work is trust and communication. We implicity trust our colleagues that they're going to make the best decisions possible for the questions that they see arise. When they can't on their own we not only value but greatly respect people for asking for input, guidance, and / or assistance. Everyone knows that the team doesn't succeed unless all it's members succeed.

Open communication is the anchor in all of this. We communicate constantly with one another using several different media. GitHub tickets allow for detailing thought processes and iterating on ideas collaboratively. We use Slack for real time chat to ask quick questions and for coordinating things on the fly. While both GitHub and Slack are asychronous media, we use the power of the human voice daily to keep project momentum moving forward.

This week's official launch of Mapbox Mobile was the culmination of a lot of hard wark done by a dedicated team of people distributed around the globe. The end product is amazing (seriously you gotta play with this) with an equally impressive tech list, but the real story is how we pulled this all off working together as a unified team.

This project certainly wasn't anyone's first rodeo, but it did come with a lot of unkowns. Mapbox is a growing company which means new people coming on board and everyone working with people that they may not have worked with (or even met) before. There were also A LOT of moving tech pieces that many hadn't worked with before nor we even knew we needed until we got into the project. Finally, did I mention that the team was distributed across 5 countries and 6 different timezones?

Earlier this month I had the great fortune to officially join the Mapbox team. Mapbox is an amazing team of people who build tools to allow everyone to create their own custom designed maps for the Web, mobile devices, or even a canvas print for your wall!

Mapbox at its core truly values and actively contributes not only to Open Source software but Open Data. The maps are all powered by OpenStreetMap, which is like the Wikipedia for maps and geo data. This data is all freely available to everyone in the world and even more importantly can be contributed to by anyone in a transparent way. The software tools are also available on the Mapbox GitHub site for anyone to use and contribute to.

It turns out that the actual issue with iMac and OS X Yosemite had more to do with a faulty video card than OS X Yosemite. After getting by for a week or so using the permissions reset solution my iMac eventually started to display green vertical bars and hung at boot up. After trying everything under the sun that I could think of I finally admitted failure and called for reinforcements from my good friend and awesome Mac expert Steve Yuroff. He promptly figured out that it was a hardware issue and directed me to the Apple Store.

Apple was fantastic throughout this entire experience. The "Genius" (still don't like that term, but whatever) at the Genius Bar was super approachable and I could tell that he defined success by wanting to solve my problem (i.e. my iMac "didn't work") and not just diagnosing a bad piece of hardware. Couple of quick tests later he determined that this was a known issue with the AMD Radeon video card in this model of iMac and that it would be a free repair. I left my iMac at the Apple Store while they ordered the part to repair it. Apple even sent me an email 2 days later to let me know when the part arrived here in Madison. I picked up my repaired iMac the next day and have been running normally since then. #KnockOnWood

I've been running OS X Yosemite on my 2011 iMac for a few weeks now. I really like it as it's seems to have breathed some life back into the old hardware. That said, I have had several times where the display will just gray out or stop working. Trying to reboot only starts an infinite loop of reboots as it makes it halfway through startup, stalls, and then automatically reboots itself. After MANY hours of searching, the only solution that I've found is to boot into Recovery Mode and use the Disk Utility to Verify and Repair Permissions.

I have had the great privilege of getting to work with the Mapbox team and other open source contributors since January on the brand new Mapbox Android SDK. Today the first supported version was officially released! While there's still a lot more to do, it's an exciting day as it's now possible to get all the amazing OpenStreetMap powered maps (Satellite, Terrain, Street) on Android as first class citizens. For more information check out the blog posting on the release. Also be sure to check out the free demo app that's available on Google Play. The project is also looking for more developers so if you're interested you too can participate. Just check it out on GitHub -> https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-android-sdk

“The more you blog, the less you are building”

A well thought out and highly accurate description of why large scale tech projects fail, especially ones in the public sector.