4 ms·
They had an interesting start. They started as Development Seed[1] a Drupal development house in and around DC that specialized in non-profit, NGO, and governme
by zappo2938 10y ago
They had an interesting start. They started as Development Seed[1] a Drupal development house in and around DC that specialized in non-profit, NGO, and government websites, web apps. They were working on a lot of Drupal projects using geographic location data. They had some cool stuff and received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Knight Foundation to develop open source mapping projects. I think in the beginning, 6 years ago, they used OpenLayers[2], started creating their own tile sets and MapBox grew out of that. One of the projects the Knight Foundation sponsored is Managing News[3] which never really took off (awesome technology came out of the project but it was kinda cheesy) but all the founders of MapBox heavily developed it including Will White, Alex Barth, Young Hahn, Jeff Miccolis, and Tom MacWright. As Development Seed matured they stopped wanting to store configuration in the database which was one part of a huge battle between Dries Buytaert and Earl Miles and the Development Seed crew who subsequently dropped Drupal almost all of a sudden, stopped supporting their products (responsibly as Phase 2 picked them up), PHP, and became an early adopter of Node.js. That's when MapBox was spun from Development Seed. (I can't verify anything I say is true.)
[1] https://www.developmentseed.org/ https://www.developmentseed.org/
[2] https://www.drupal.org/project/openlayers https://www.drupal.org/project/openlayers
[3] https://www.drupal.org/project/managingnews https://www.drupal.org/project/managingnews
- incanus77 10y agoDSer/Mapboxer since 2010 here. More or less accurate.
- zappo2938 10y agoHistory of MapBox. 1. Development Seed created a heat map of crime in DC[1] and wanted dark tiles. So 3 of the founders, Alex Barth, Jeff Miccolis, and Tom MacWright created the Nice Map module[2] as a tile (WMS) management client for Drupal. 2. Development Seed uses Mapnik to manage their WMS server [3] 3. Development Seed started to share tile sets for maps hosted on AWS on Mapbox.com.[4] 4. The MapBox product is created and effort is put into it.[5] 5. They created Maps on a Stick and iOS client apps [6] 6. TileMill is released so people can create their own map tiles[7] 7. Development jumps from Drupal and the LAMP stack to Node.js and MabBox.[8] [1] https://developmentseed.org/blog/2008/nov/18/hey-thats-nice-map-new-custom-mapping-module-drupal/ https://developmentseed.org/blog/2008/nov/18/hey-thats-nice-... [2] https://www.drupal.org/project/nicemap https://www.drupal.org/project/nicemap [3] https://developmentseed.org/blog/2008/dec/10/get-over-first-hump-making-completely-custom-beautiful-maps-install-mapnik-ubuntu/ https://developmentseed.org/blog/2008/dec/10/get-over-first-... [4] https://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/dec/16/us-congressional-districts-tiles-and-great-american-hackathon/ https://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/dec/16/us-congressiona... [5] https://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/feb/24/mapbox-world-tiles-get-update/ https://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/feb/24/mapbox-world-ti... [6] https://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/oct/02/maps-stick-version-2-released/ https://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/oct/02/maps-stick-vers... [7] https://www.mapbox.com/blog/announcing-tilemill-modern-map-design-studio-powered-open-source/ https://www.mapbox.com/blog/announcing-tilemill-modern-map-d... [8] https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Development-Seed-abandon-Drupal https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Development-Seed-abandon-Drupa...
- incanus77 10y agoThat puts it up to 2011, sure :)