James Milner
@jameslmilner.bsky.social
1.2K followers 230 following 160 posts
Staff Engineer, open source fan, hacking on geospatial in my spare time. Lives in London
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jameslmilner.bsky.social
After 2.5+ years, Terra Draw v1 is finally released 😌
✏️ Draw on web maps with the 10 built in modes (Point, Line, Polygon, Rectangle etc!)
🗺️ Supports Leaflet, @maplibre.org, @openlayers.org, Google Maps, Mapbox

Check it out: github.com/JamesLMilner... #geojson #maplibre #leafletjs #openlayers
Reposted by James Milner
cloudnativegeo.org
🎙️Join the next episode of the Great Data Products podcast LIVE on Oct 29 at 4pm PDT! @jed.co will sit down for a conversation with @bdon.org about building maps for the web. Brandon is the creator of @protomaps.com. Register to watch live here ⤵️

greatdataproducts.com/housekeeping...
jameslmilner.bsky.social
Good morning Leeds ☕😎@uk.osgeo.org #foss4guk
jameslmilner.bsky.social
Forgot to mention, I'll be talking about this at FOSS4G UK tomorrow morning in Leeds 🗺️
jameslmilner.bsky.social
I've been working on an open source library to do routing in JavaScript called Terra Route. This morning I've added functionality for understanding complex graphs, you can get info like the number of nodes, edges, lengths, degrees, connected components etc! github.com/JamesLMilner...
Reposted by James Milner
jameslmilner.bsky.social
I've been working on an open source library to do routing in JavaScript called Terra Route. This morning I've added functionality for understanding complex graphs, you can get info like the number of nodes, edges, lengths, degrees, connected components etc! github.com/JamesLMilner...
Reposted by James Milner
marvinh.dev
Unwritten rule:

Deep technical programming topics
🤝
Blog with barely any CSS
Reposted by James Milner
uk.osgeo.org
This is the final regsitration call for #FOSS4GUK in Leeds on 1st and 2nd October. 🚨🚨

We have about 20 tickets left. Day tickets are also available. 🎟️🎟️🎟️

uk.osgeo.org/foss4guk2025...

We close registration 21st Sept and we really would like you to meet all of our amazing sponsors in Leeds.
jameslmilner.bsky.social
Devs can often get labelled as pedantic, but if you don't actually handle the edge cases your customer service department will
jameslmilner.bsky.social
A big part of being a software developer is surfacing and handling ambiguity. 'What happens if the user presses the button twice?'
jameslmilner.bsky.social
AI powered 'spec driven development' would require organisations to carefully and deeply articulate what they want in clear and precise language - something developers have been begging for already for 50+ years. Maybe there is a harder and deeper problem at play here...
Reposted by James Milner
Reposted by James Milner
mirandaheath.website
I'm working on a report on the causes of burnout in open source software. If you're a part of the OSS community, I would love to hear your thoughts, either here on Bluesky, or privately via email (see post). Thanks 😊

mirandaheath.website/report-on-bu...
Report on Burnout in Open Source Software
I am currently working on a report on the causes of burnout in open source software, and am inviting the OSS community to share their thoughts!
mirandaheath.website
jameslmilner.bsky.social
Made some performance improvements to Terra Route, a JavaScript shortest path library. Here's a video at 4x CPU slowdown, comparing the next fastest library (green route) against my latest changes (purple route). Here's the link: github.com/jameslmilner...
jameslmilner.bsky.social
Zero dependency dependency
Reposted by James Milner
Reposted by James Milner
edent.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Nominate your favourite UK-based #opensource heroes at https://openuk.uk/awards/

This isn't pay-to-win. We don't charge for nominations and the award ceremony is also free (and very swanky!).

Please - show your support for your favourite people, projects […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
OpenlK
6th Annual Awards, 2025
Nominations close
on 14 September
Reposted by James Milner
pixelatedboat.bsky.social
Thank god AI has finally solved the problem of there not being enough podcasts
Reposted by James Milner
danabra.mov
dan @danabra.mov · Sep 7
you can just post here
jameslmilner.bsky.social
Sam's work is always so beautiful and considered - a great follow if you don't already
samwho.dev
Sam Rose @samwho.dev · Aug 23
✨ Big O ✨

Let me take you on a visual introduction to what big O notation is in my new blog post: samwho.dev/big-o.

With big O notation you can better understand how algorithms will perform in practice, finding orders of magnitude improvements often with very simple changes to your code.
Reposted by James Milner
scottspence.dev
New job title just dropped on LinkedIn

“Vibe code cleanup specialist”
Vibe code cleanups specialist job titles on LinkedIn
Reposted by James Milner
hotosm.org
𝗛𝗢𝗧 𝘅 𝗠𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗠𝗮𝗽𝘀 𝗟𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗻-𝗣𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗻

This is a great opportunity to meet the Missing Maps community, HOT staff & connect with fellow mappers.

Tuesday, 23 September 2025
Get your 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗲𝘁𝘀 here: bit.ly/4lCw3CY
Reposted by James Milner
thepunderwoman.com
When open source projects reject a PR, we're not doing it out of animus. Many times people create PRs with valuable changes, and while correct, would break so many people that we can't land it without a massive effort. We can't always commit to that. A lot of factors go into these decisions.
jameslmilner.bsky.social
👀
jakobmiksch.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
#maplibre #vectortile #geodata #gis #gischat
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10791
MapLibre Tile: A Next Generation Vector Tile Format
The Mapbox Vector Tile (MVT) format is widely considered the leading open standard for large-scale map visualization, as evidenced by its widespread adoption by major technology companies such as AWS, Meta, and Microsoft for their products and services. However, MVT was developed nearly a decade ago and, consequently, does not fully align with the capabilities of new geospatial data sources that are characterized by rapidly increasing data volumes due to advancements in geospatial sensors and automated detection through artificial intelligence. In this paper, we introduce the MapLibre Tile (MLT) format, a novel vector tile specification designed from the ground up to address the limitations of MVT. Our experiments, simulating user sessions on widely used basemap datasets, demonstrate that MLT achieves up to three times better compression ratios compared to MVT on encoded tilesets, with over six times better on certain large tiles. Additionally, MLT offers decoding speeds that are up to three times faster and significantly enhances processing performance. MLT also introduces new functionalities and is specifically designed to lay the foundation for the next generation of map renderers, which we expect to entirely offload processing to the GPU, thereby overcoming the stagnation of Moore`s law.
arxiv.org