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What has working with the mapbox map been like? I tried to create a world map website before but I did a custom map. In the end I spent all my time getting overlays on the map to work before I got bored and moved on to something else.

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Mapbox certainly has been challenging. I read over a lot of code I found through GitHub search to figure out the overlays, and then went down a big rabbit hole trying to improve the rendering performance without much to show for it — I still think the way we render the overlays is a performance issue, but it could also be that Mapbox loads an entire webgl rendering engine with a lot of features we don't need.

Longer term we'll probably move to OpenLayers + OpenStreetMap because Mapbox data is out of our budget by about 2 orders of magnitude.

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