I rebuilt my hobby mapping platform

A couple of weeks back I realize that unemployment was about to hit me for the first time in my 25 year old career.

I had not been really developing for the last 10 years or so, but had my old hobby mapping platform up and running and creating modest revenue to pay for the hosting costs. I

Didn’t ever really try this vibecode thing seriously, but decided to stay relevant I should look into it (whatever it’s called now Agentic Engineering, whatever). I had dabbled with JavaScript/Typescript over the years (mostly just adding small hacks and kludges for marketing at work), but always felt Node had too much baggage.

So to give Deno a go. From the frameworks I chose Fresh because it was first party. And now here we are 14 days later my multi-tenant site is live in 30+ locales fully translated running it’s own routing and geocoder. Additionally I had translations and data from before, but did a ton of data wrangling and exploring of the data structure.

Can’t say how amazed by not only Deno, Claude, but also the state the open mapping ecosystem has reached. It’s amazing to use the combination of OSM, OSMR and MapLibre GL are. Last time I worked on this hobby the commercial APIs were hands down better.

You could call me jaded and tired of all the hype on average. But for me this was an exciting journey of discovery and enjoying building things.

P.S. If anyone’s hiring I’m available remote or in Finland from July - drop me a line at [email protected]