Hey! I'm Vladimir Agafonkin (aka @mourner) from Kyiv, Ukraine.
In 2008, I started working on a small web maps library in secret from my boss, who insisted that I should stop "reinventing the wheel" and just use "mature, established solutions". When I reached out to the map developers community, my idea was ridiculed for "wasting time instead of contributing to existing projects".
This little library, Leaflet, eventually became one of the most influential projects in the mapping industry. It is used by Facebook, GitHub, Foursquare, Evernote, Flickr, Pinterest, Etsy, Craigslist, European Commission, NPR, The Washington Post and the like, and has almost 22k stars and 600 contributors on GitHub.
For the last 4.5 years, I've been building mapping tools of the future at Mapbox, focusing on the next-generation map technology, vector maps, and in particular performance, data visualization and computational geometry algorithms. Here are a few examples of what I do:
- A dive into spatial search algorithms
- How I built a wind map with WebGL
- Introducing heatmaps in Mapbox GL
- Rendering big geodata on the fly with GeoJSON-VT
To keep track of all the open source projects I'm involved with, I created this list. There are many, thanks to Mapbox — I'm incredibly lucky and grateful to have the privilege to work on open source full-time, and do it remotely from Kyiv.
Outside of engineering, I write songs, play guitar and sing in progressive rock band Obiymy Doschu. We've recently released an album we've worked on for 8 years. The lyrics are Ukrainian, but give the album a chance — if you like beautiful, evocative, multilayered rock music, it will speak to you nevertheless.
I'm also a happy father of 4-year-old twin girls. Here's me and my family celebrating Ukraine's Independence Day last year.
Ask me anything!
Latest comments (78)
love leaflet (but its a shame mapstraction seems to have died)
Thanks for your amazing work on Leaflet, I'm doing up a few tutorials on Dev.to at the moment and would love to teach people about leaflet as I further my knowledge on leaflet. I'm currently working on a tutorial on how to customise leaflet for the start of a web GIS interface 😀
Hi @mourner !
I have a question, do you know about the lib react-leaflet ?
In case of a yes, could you post something about rotation ? especially a retangle, because I could do using just Leaflet but passing to react couldn't make it. So I was hoping if you could help.
Thanks, you are awesome
ps. Sorry for my english, It's not my native language.
very humble, wish you success in all your life, thanks a lot for helping us.
Can you talk about the leaflet architecture and what books used for learn javascript + web mapping?
Hi Vlad,
I'm pretty much in awe of your and your team's work on Leaflet. Thanks for that great resource, not only for making nice Web maps, but also for showing us how to code by reading your code.
My question is: do you think it will be important for maps to become an internet media type, like video or SVG? Will this (script-less mapping) help get kids involved in mapping?
LTTP here but wanted to say thank you for creating Leaflet. I use it at work to display maps on our website with custom tiles and it works great!
Hi Vladimir.
Looks like I'm a bit too late for the party, but still, I've decided to drop in with some words of appreciation.
I'm using leaflet for my pet-project and although I can't appreciate it at full-scale as pet-project is something that you craft for 15 minutes per month still I've enjoyed using this library and was pleased to hear that the author comes from the same city as me.
But what was the most surprising is that you're a guitarist of Обійми Дощу. This is really amazing how one can be both a decent software engineer and successful artist. Your path inspires me a lot!
P.S. Today I've listened to your new album Сон. Although IMO it's hard to say something new in a genre of progressive metal as there are already some mastodons who are there for decades, still I enjoy how you've embraced dozen of influences we love in progressive metal to create your own beautiful multi-layered mixture. Although Обійми Дощу and Somali Yacht Club represent different genres to me they both are great this year discoveries which show how Ukrainians do some world-class musicianship. Keep rocking \m/
I got a big inspiration from you now.
But how can I keep myself as engineer working with only programming; because sometimes it is really hard for me when above management trying to push me into management role and I don't want.
Would you please give suggestion; I wanna stay in engineer path like you.
THANKS!
Thank you! I was just always upfront about it — if management asked me about how I see my career going forward, I'd always answer that I want to continue solving difficult engineering challenges, and not interested in management roles.
What do you think are main pain-points of leading open source projects and what can be done to reduce them? Also, how do you mitigate burnout and frustration when dealing with people's "silly problems" (I don't mean it, I just can't find better wording) instead of really pushing your projects forward?
Feeling guilty about unsolved issues piling up is a big pain point, and so is dealing with toxic people. What I found as a good strategy is:
At the beginning, I tried to reply to everyone, but when you have an inbox that looks like this, you just have to stop worrying and blaming yourself for not responding, otherwise I'd burn out and stop doing open source a long time ago: