By: Eric Gundersen
Since the beginning of time, humans have been explorers. It has been our shared quest to discover and measure and build the world around us. Maps are humanity’s living document.
The power to make maps is the power to define a narrative. Thanks to platforms that put developers first, that power belongs now to all of us. Today, we are all map makers. And by these maps, we tell our human story.
This is what makes Mapbox developers special: we are builders, creating with and for our communities.
When we started building Mapbox, we were working in places where the maps were blank. Monitoring deforestation in the Congo; tracking malaria and seeing where we should put clinics in Nigeria; using satellite imagery to monitor 1,000-year floods that engulfed Pakistan. When I first landed in Kabul in 2009 to monitor the election results, the city was only the intersection of Ring Road and Jalalabad Road coming up from the south. How were we going to map the election?
We needed better tools to look at complex data on the map. So we built those tools. And we gave them to the world. Then the magic happened. Mapbox developers create a live, global, real-time map. Fast forward to now, where more than 1.1 million developers building on Mapbox are creating the location data layer of a new world.
So what does this new world look like?
Our location layer is composed of a network of decentralized sensors, phones, vehicles, and other signals. More than 350 million people touch our maps every month — from sharing pictures on Snapchat to seeing if it’s going to rain on the Weather Channel, to watching your groceries delivered on Instacart. Every user interaction generates aggregated, anonymous data which go back into making our platform better. This is how we’re building a live map of the world — and providing it to developers so that they can keep building and telling our stories.
Throughout our growth, we have stayed true to our developer-first, open platform roots. We obsess over extensible, flexible tools that give developers full control of their location-based experiences.
Putting developers first means offering the building blocks that anyone can stack up to build. And we’re going to stay that way.
So join us: between now and June 11th, any developer new to Mapbox can sign up and use all our pay-as-you-go APIs, for free. You don’t even need to add a credit card to get started. Just add #WeAreBuilders and tweet us a link to your map.
Developer Maps Platform was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.