Skip to content
  • Mapbox Locate 2018 revolved around the topics data visualization, machine learning, and AR.
  • Ubilabs' software engineer Franz added a short vacation to his conference trip to explore San Francisco.
  • Mapbox Locate 2018 took place at San Francisco's Pier 27.

Insights

4 Insights from Mapbox Locate 2018

Mapbox Locate 2018 was a must for every developer who likes working with the technology – such as our software engineer Franz Neubert. Read up on his most interesting insights from the Mapbox conference and his personal San Francisco highlights.

1. Kepler.gl: Fast visualization of complex data sets

My conference highlight was the release of UBER’s kepler.gl. It’s a browser-based tool that visualizes complex data in a quick and easy way. Nicolas Belmonte (talk “Uber Location Data”)  and  Shan He (talk “Secret Product TBA”) shared super interesting insights into the tool. At Ubilabs, we had the chance to beta test the tool ahead of its release and I was curious to see how other devs would feel about it. It’s great that they liked it just as much as we do.

2. How satellite imagery providers use their images to support rescue missions

“Pixelmonster Attacks Satellite Image Processing” was a talk on managing and distributing satellite imagery at scale. I found it fascinating how providers such as Digital Globe are able to deliver satellite images fast enough that they can help rescue and recovery missions.

3. Inside Mapbox GL JS

“Render Maps and Data at Global Scale” by Lauren Budorick provided a great overview of how Mapbox GL JS works. It confirmed our previous positive experiences with the library that we’ve already used in quite a few of our projects.

4. San Francisco is always worth a visit

Luckily, it was no problem to extend my conference trip by a few days off. The city is always worth a stay. And since I was there anyway, I went to UBER’s “Data Engineering” meetup, where I had the chance to listen to really interesting technical talks by Airbnb, WeWork, and UBER.