Development Seed Blog

They were once Development Seed [0], a company that specialized in making geo spatial visualizations for the UN, NGOs and non profits. Development Seed was a large contributors of code and modules to Drupal 6 which they left. In the beginning, their open source mapping and geo spatial visualizations projects were mostly funded by grants from the Knight Foundation which funded news related projects. MapBox came from an in house tool they developed to create and manage map overlay tiles. (I could be making this all up.) [0] https://developmentseed.org/

When Healthcare.gov was first built, before the "enroll in insurance" feature launched and failed, it was a static site managed by a Github-based editor called Prose.io. https://developmentseed.org/blog/new-healthcare-gov-is-open-and-cms-fr… https://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content-editor-f… I have not used prose.io, but the company that built it, Development Seed, is strong. You might have heard of one of their other projects: Mapbox. I have no idea if prose.io is being currently maintained. Development Seed was in the middle of transitioning to doing Mapbox full time, and Healthcare.gov was their "one last" consulting project. By all accounts their work on the static part of the site was great, but was totally overshadowed by the failure of the enrollment feature.

News and background on Development Seed's great work: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/jan/02/major-mapbox-investments-c…

You can do really nice things with jekyll for example developmentseed website [http://developmentseed.org/]. You can check a post about it http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/09/09/jekyll-github-pages/

We have had a good deal of luck using ElasticSearch to index and query our couchdb databases on some projects. Couch publishes a _changes feed that allows ES to subscribe to updates and index them as soon as they hit the database. It has a very powerful JSON based query language that eased a lot of the pain points related to couchdb views for us. I wrote an article about my experiences with it : http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/may/31/flexible-faceting-and-full…

Great work by the awesome folks at Development Seed! For more about the tech behind the site, see http://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/apr/20/world-bank-open-data-initi…

You can go very far. Facebook apps, mobile apps, SMS, Mapping, Here are some impressive implementations: http://www.drupalgardens.com/ http://openatrium.com/ http://groups.drupal.org/aegir-hosting-system http://developmentseed.org/ -> Their projects are cool http://drupal.org/project/modules?filters=drupal_core%3A87&solrsor… -> Modules organized by usage. Go through a few pages to see some specific use-case modules. http://2bits.com/articles/presentation-28-million-page-views-day-70-mi… -> Drupal is NOT slow when configured properly. www.whitehouse.gov is probably pretty cool. I recommend http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/state-drupal for an idea of where Drupal is today. I'm curious what other HN people think about Drupal. Would love to hear.

Development Seed | Washington D.C. | Cloud Engineer | Full-time, Onsite | https://developmentseed.org/careers/cloud-engineer/ Development Seed is an engineering and design shop based in Washington, DC, Lisbon, Portugal and Ayacucho, Peru. We’re a team of twenty-six developers and designers creating positive social impact with open tech and open knowledge alongside organizations like the World Bank, the Washington Post, and NASA. We are looking for an engineer to help us build powerful open tools for managing and distributing data in the cloud. You’ll build reliable, scalable services optimized to deliver petabytes of satellite imagery data to millions of simultaneous users. You will be solving real problems for organizations that address big global challenges. You will be using the best technology available on a team of people that want you to grow and win. You: - Collaborate — Working as a team makes us stronger than any individual developer. You write clear Github tickets and communicate effectively on Slack and in-person. - Learn — We constantly evolve our technology stack and techniques to deliver the best work to our partners. You don’t need to know any particular language or framework upfront but you need to demonstrate you’re able and excited to learn new ways to build. You’ve also tried out enough options to know that the hip new thing isn’t always the best solution. - Code — You write code focusing on both performance and maintainability. You know when to use…

Development Seed | Machine Learning Engineer | Washington, DC + Lisbon, Portugal | Full-Time, On-site Preferred | https://developmentseed.org/careers/machine-learning/ Development Seed seeks an engineer with experience in machine learning. Here, you will work with us to build tools that extract insights from large datasets, especially satellite imagery data. You will help solve pressing social and environmental challenges, and create powerful new knowledge for organizations like UNICEF, the World Bank, The Washington Post, and NASA. Our work is a combination of research, implementation, and delivery, and you’ll partner with researchers at half a dozen universities to explore novel machine learning approaches. Ultimately, you’ll build tools that help our clients make better decisions and deliver better services. Development Seed is a group of developers and designers who create positive social impact with open tech and open knowledge. We specialize in platforms that derive useful insights from complex data. We are currently building a suite of tools to allow these global organizations to benefit from powerful machine learning methods. At the heart of this effort is our Skynet suite, which automates mapping in developing countries using OSM as a training set: https://developmentseed.org/blog/2017/01/30/machine-learning-learnings… If this sounds like something you want to work on, send your resume to [email protected]. Tell us about yourself and what you’d love to…

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/ [2] https://www.drupal.org/project/openlayers [3] https://www.drupal.org/project/managingnews

How does this compare to obstore? [1] [1] https://developmentseed.org/obstore/latest/

I do applaud this kind of work. Better, faster tooling for data as files and moving across runtimes is sorely needed. Two things I would hope to see before I'd start using Vorter is geospatial data support (there's already Geoparquet [1]) and WASM for in-browser Arrow processing. Things like Lonboard [2] and Observable framework [3] rely on Parquet, Arrow and Duckdb files for their powerful data analytics and visualisation. [1] https://geoparquet.org [2] https://developmentseed.org/lonboard/latest/ [3] https://observablehq.com/framework/

I develop Lonboard [0], a Python library for plotting large geospatial data. If you have small data (~max 30,000 coordinates), leaflet-based Python libraries like folium and ipyleaflet can be fine, but because Lonboard uses deck.gl for GPU-accelerated rendering, it's 30-50x faster than leaflet for large datasets [1]. [0]: https://developmentseed.org/lonboard/latest/ [1]: https://developmentseed.org/lonboard/latest/how-it-works/

Weather data is a system where we have a really good understanding of the underlying physics but can’t do enough computation to simulate them in a way that’s detailed enough to make truly accurate predictions. Machine learning is all about finding an unknown function that underlies known data. This is sort of the opposite issue: we know the underlying function but can’t compute it. That said, ML models are being applied to situations where the whether data doesn’t translate directly into known physical quantities, like satellite images (see https://developmentseed.org/projects/hurricane-intensity/)

Originator of MBTiles format here. The initial intentions were moving 100,000s of raster map tiles between computer and mobile device, either over USB or network. Main benefit was avoiding per-file transaction overhead, as well as checksumming potential. Side benefits included a small space savings over filesystem because of block overhead, plus later iterations allowed for de-duplication of e.g. all-blue water map tiles. These days, we still use the format for transport between local machine and the Mapbox backend, despite having moved to "vector tiles", which essentially are protocol buffer-based encoded geometries directly. Original post: https://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/oct/08/portable-map-tiles-format…

> What is the easiest way to contribute and map out these roads on OpenStreetMap? Dunno about easiest, but the most effective is probably to just buy the detailed satellite/aerial imagery, (http://microsites.digitalglobe.com/30cm/) run some machine learning algorithms to identify roads, and upload that. https://github.com/trailbehind/DeepOSM https://developmentseed.org/blog/2017/01/30/machine-learning-learnings…

It’s actually pretty straightforward to create a multilingual Jekyll site: http://developmentseed.org/blog/multilingual-jekyll-sites. And using something like Prose, multiple non-technical authors can update a Jekyll site: http://prose.io/#about.

Jekyll is much simpler still, and is what most of those kind of sites actually need. http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/07/27/build-cms-free-websites/ see also: http://prose.io

Yep. This is a good blog post by Development Seed about their static-only website approach: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/07/27/build-cms-free-websites/

Hi! I'm the developer behind the original version of Prose: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content-editor-fo… I'm no longer involved in the development. However, I do understand your security concerns. But I think this is not just a discussion about the limitations of OAuth Scopes. When using a hosted service, you always pay the price of loosing full control of your data. In return it's very convenient. I wrote an article about decentralized publishing the other day. https://medium.com/p/626055376c81 I would also like to mention the project I'm working on right now, Substance. It is an easy-to use self-publishing system, which runs locally and thus gives you full control about your content. (at least until you publish it, because then there's no way back ;)) See: http://substance.io Cheers, Michael

I'm not sure if this fits all your needs but there seems to be at least some meaningful overlap: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content-editor-fo…

Does anyone have more information about what exactly is going wrong with this site? Apparently Development Seed (the company behind http://mapbox.com) was (one of?) the contractors behind the project[0] and they've always seemed (at least judging from their product offerings) quite competent. 0. http://developmentseed.org/blog/2013/06/25/healthcare-launches-in-the-…

Developmentseed posted about exactly how and why they designed the architecture the way they have a few months ago: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2013/06/25/healthcare-launches-in-the-… In summary: static website served via Jekyll and pushed into CDN, little to no content management outside of Prose.io, open source on Github, etc. These "IT experts" aren't impressed, huh? Well, this "IT expert" is. So they went down the first time they took a ridiculous traffic spike? So what? If it didn't go down under 8.6 million unique load I'd be suspicious.

I do a lot of django, so I wanted mezzanine to work out. Unfortunately, it's a challenege. Wordpress is wordpress. You're stuck with php and mysql. (ick). Jekyll is awesome and together with http://prose.io, it's basically a cms. http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/07/27/build-cms-free-websites/

I second the "ADD": Development Seed did something very similar on http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/nov/29/open-undp-launches/ and my friends at Wiredcraft are thinking about the same thing for a couple visualization websites (lots of map, lots of data, low amount of edits). Jekyll can be pretty damn slow though (especially on Github pages) so be careful with the size of your data set.

Basically the answer to all of these questions is that it's easier to decode in the browser. A UTFGrid is just plain JSON, so we can just run it through JSON.parse(). PNG uses zlib compression, so we can get that benefit for free when sending gzip over HTTP. Here's some more design rationale: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/09/21/how-interactivity-works-utf…

Plans for Windows just announced in the 2012 roadmap: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/jan/02/major-mapbox-investments-c… "Just two months ago, after Node.js added native Windows support, we started testing and porting TileMill to a native Windows application. We plan to release a beta version this quarter"

What I always found a bit annoying about jekyll (at least without plugin or forks) is that something like http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/ or http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/09/ doesn't work, i.e. the set of archive pages is pretty limited. You get one big one, and then a simple numeric pagination. I used some perl script ages ago (blosxom?), and it did just that. Still, I guess I can hack that into the code somehow… One "prepackaged" jekyll configuration that looks quite interesting is Octopress: http://octopress.org/