Intro to CartoDB Recap

Last night James gave a short talk on CartoDB (maptime.io/cartodb-tutorial), followed by a tutorial of making a map of world cities sized by population. Data for the world cities came from Natural Earth, a really great resource for public domain cartographic features. After the tutorial, Maptimers worked a few exercises, such as making a choropleth map of population in US counties, and an animated “torque” map of all the earthquakes in the last 30 days. The tutorial and exercise prompts can be found at maptimeatx.github.io/cartodb-exercises/.

We had a great group of folks come to the meetup, including several new members. We hope we see you all again at future Maptimes!

Thanks once again to ObjectRocket for hosting and to CartoDB for pizza!

Intro to Turf Recap

On 6/10/15 James gave an Intro to Turf.js presentation. The slides can be found at maptimeatx.github.io/intro-to-turf. The presentation also includes a hands-on activity for groups to work on together. Turf.js is a relatively new JavaScript library for geospatial analysis. More information, including documentation and neat interactive examples, can be found at turfjs.org.

Thanks to ObjectRocket for hosting and to CartoDB for pizza!

Hand Drawn Maps Recap

On 2/25/15 we had a really cool meetup on hand-drawn maps. This session was led by local artist & architect Ann Armstrong, one of the collaborators of the Austin’s Atlas project. We had a total of 25 attendees, making this one of our largest sessions to date.

Ann guided the group through three different mapping prompts: mapping your daily commute, mapping your childhood home, and mapping Austin’s downtown alleys. The third prompt was an especially cool exercise where the group broke up into small groups to explore and map nearby alleys. Alleyways are often forgotten and nameless areas, but they each can hold their own interesting secrets and characteristics. Here are scans of the maps we created: http://issuu.com/austinsatlas/docs/atlasissuumaptime

Photos from the meetup can be seen at http://www.meetup.com/MaptimeATX/photos/25942290/.

Thanks to MakerSquare for hosting!

Inaugural Meetup Summary

Last night was MaptimeATX’s first full-fledged meetup and it was a big success! We had a full house of approximately 30 people in MakerSquare’s ancillary classroom on Brazos Street in Downtown Austin. Pizza and drinks from Hoboken Pies were graciously provided by Rackspace.

James gave a presentation on Web Mapping Fundamentals, which covered the basics pieces of moden web maps, such as tiles, web mapping libraries, and vectors. After the presentation was a brief coding exercise where attendees learned how to use Leaflet to make simple web maps of their own.

The presentation is available online at http://maptimeatx.github.io/web-mapping-fundamentals/, and the source files for it are in MaptimeATX’s GitHub account at https://github.com/MaptimeATX.

Thanks to all who came out to our first meetup, and we look forward to seeing you all at the next one! Stay tuned for details!

Hello world

MaptimeATX is the Austin, TX, branch of Maptime! Yeehaw!