lukeqsee

This is because everything is in digital form. Essentially all government systems are digital-first, and for the citizen, often digital-only. If the data is lost, there may be no paper records to restore everything from land registry, business registry (operating agreements, ownership records), etc.

Without an out-of-country backup, a reversion to previous statuses means the country is lost (Estonia has been occupied a lot). With it, much of the government can continue to function, as an expat government until freedom and independence is restored.

Thanks for the compliment!

Definitely drop us a line. Our v2 response structure is still undergoing some iteration, especially around the particulars of labeling, so this may be intended (depending on the specific query), but we can certainly look into it to confirm that.

That's just not the case.

For a good geocoder, you need many other data sources (which can be open). OpenAddresses (https://openaddresses.io/) is an example of a vital dataset to delivering anything of any quality.

Returning real results requires extensive parsing and awareness of addresses and place data (including localization of them), and this is not something you get for free based on OSM data.

Since this article was written, we've (Stadia Maps) also launched and made significant progress with our own Geocoding API: https://stadiamaps.com/products/geocoding-search/

It was originally based on Pelias, but we've since augmented with additional data sources (such as Foursquare OS Places) and significantly improved the baseline for performance and accuracy.

Happy to answer questions on the topic!

The green card system is already broken (this is pretty universally agreed). The notion that receiving a degree in the US—which often entails a large degree of cultural assimilation—doesn't give you a strong argument for being able to stay if you can find a job is archaic.

It's not like large tech companies don't know how to employee people in other countries, so I doubt this is going to impact hiring rates of foreign US-graduates, but rather keep more talent in the US (good for the US) and should have little to no effect on wages (again, if a tech company wants to hire them, they'll just hire them at a foreign office where they can obtain a working permit).

Switzerland, Init7

10/10 Gbps for 66CHF (~$70) / month.

Unfortunately my router can't firewall packets at 10Gbps so I get around 1Gbps effectively. :)

Thanks for the kind words!

No idea which customer you are :), but if you ever want to have a chat or have feedback, ping me!

Ah, that makes sense.

I'd take a look at https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler -- I bet that fits the bill for what you need if you have the servers but need the data. :)

Thanks for the kind words! :)

My company may be able to help save you the trouble of self-hosting. We do have a free tier (for non-commercial / test usage), and our pricing structure allows you to save quite a bit compared to MapTiler.

I don't think so. There's this: https://github.com/protomaps/go-pmtiles to get from MBTiles and there's a few xyz folder tree tools to get mbtiles from that structure (e.g., https://pypi.org/project/mbutil/). So you can get there, but I don't know of a good straight-line right now.

Thanks for taking up the maintenance of Tippecanoe! I haven't needed to use it too much, but when I have, it fills a nice void.

> PMTiles aside, this is still Mapbox’s world.

Isn't this a bit like saying we're still in Google's world because most maps still use Web Mercator? :)

Good tech builds on what came before. Mapbox did a lot of ground-breaking work in building tooling around OSM, but so have many others. The fact that they named it Mapbox Vector Tiles is genius in hindsight, because even though we may use tons of tooling they didn't create to build and render them, their name is still there.

> The next challenge is to evolve the tech stack to something beyond what Mapbox worked up five/ten years ago.

Agreed, and I think we've seen a lot of iterative work in the open since then. The next challenge is likely building a OSS stack to do proper 3D: open data (including OSM) to pixels, and that work is already beginning across a lot of organizations: https://github.com/nyurik/future-mvt/discussions, Overture Maps, MapLibre, etc.

Would love to chat to see if we can help you! If you want, give me a shout at luke <at> stadiamaps.com

Yes. We should, and we're literally working on it right now!

We offer a very competitive solution that is quickly becoming a one-stop shop for what you mentioned: https://stadiamaps.com.

All that functionality for a lot less than $1000 / month.

https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-leaflet exists!

It's not perfect, and you don't see the full benefit of a WebGL renderer, but if you want to keep using a Leaflet API, it's great.

A lot of servers impose a constraint on URL length, so I suspect Mapbox does on their APIs.

I discovered it while looking at raster solutions, and it is pretty great! The raster stack is pretty bonkers. TiTiler uses at least three fundamental layers: GDAL, RasterIO, and rio-tiler. Each contribute a fairly significant improvement (for the use-case) over the underlying one.

Valhalla is great (I've contributed a few patches and run it for a while)!

Also check:

http://project-osrm.org/

https://www.graphhopper.com/open-source/

Checkout https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler.

Super easy way to generate a MBTiles, which you can then serve directly, or further convert to PMTiles, which can be used to host vector tiles for client-side rendering using MapLibre (or other renderers).

Raster tiles are a lot harder because you have to generate them on the server, and that's a lot more resource intensive.

You can also sponsor MapLibre: https://github.com/sponsors/maplibre

(Disclaimer: I'm on the governing board, but derive no financial benefit from it.)

MapLibre has made really good strides (especially on the web) since the fork—3d-terrain support, more tile sources, other DX improvements (e.g., conversion to TypeScript).

https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js-docs/api/

It's hard, but certainly not impossible.

Hosting and bandwidth are key inputs to your costs, but they are manageable.

There's also support for MapLibre GL JS style specs in the works! Excited to see another stable vector tile & style renderer added to the ecosystem.

https://maplibre.org/ definitely attempts to preserve the DX with free selection of tile providers.

You typically use byte-range caching in libraries—either using an edge worker (a la Cloudflare) to create separate GET requests from the client's perspective or directly in the client.

There's actually a reason why most of these APIs support POST—most use-cases are hot-linking, where you don't control how the client makes the request. (Often using an <img>.)

Here's one alternative, if you don't want to build from scratch: https://docs.stadiamaps.com/static-maps/ We don't have much in the way of query string limits, so have at it!

This is really awesome to see.

I'm involved in many of these projects (helped get MapLibre started, wrote a library supporting PMTiles, have used OpenMapTiles for years), and to see open-source, open-data win in the end is really satisfying.

If anyone has any questions about how you could do this for yourself, I'm happy to answer! (I have a company offering SaaS maps, but we know SaaS isn't for everyone, and are happy to point people the right direction when self-hosting is what you want.)

What type of role are you looking for?

GIS is a huge space, and you could specialize in one niche for years or go more general, so it's really based on what you want to do.

I'd say there's three or four general areas: mapping & map data (mostly focused on visualization), geocoding & search (focused on helping people find things in natural language, think text -> coordinates, text -> point of interest -> coordinate), routing (focused on the mechanics of getting things from point a to point b efficiently), and finally a huge, diverse bucket of "other location APIs" (anything from geofencing to timezones to ETL specialization).

I'm happy to chat about this. We aren't hiring, but there are lots of companies that are.