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A big part of my open-source time goes into the OpenStreetMap world, and specifically into OSMTracker for Android — a GPS tracking tool for OpenStreetMap that lets mappers record tracks and tag points of interest while they’re out in the field. It has over 50,000 downloads on Google Play. I maintain it as part of my role at the Laboratorio Experimental (labexp) at the Tecnológico de Costa Rica, where I’m the OSMTracker maintenance partner — adapting the app and shipping changes to a real, sizeable user base.

labexp/osmtracker-android

GPS tracking tool for OpenStreetMap — the app I help maintain.

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What I work on

My focus is keeping a widely-used app healthy and moving the upload workflow forward — making it easier to get a recorded trace off the phone and into the hands of the community that can use it. Capturing a track is only half the job; it isn’t useful until it’s back in OpenStreetMap. Maintaining software with tens of thousands of real users is a very different discipline from a weekend project: changes have to be careful, backwards-compatible, and worth shipping.
1

Record in the field

OSMTracker captures a GPS trace and lets the mapper tag waypoints as they go.
2

Get it off the phone

The part I worked on — a smoother path from a local trace to an upload.
3

Back into OpenStreetMap

The trace becomes data the whole community can build on.

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Why OpenStreetMap

Maps are infrastructure, and in a lot of the world that infrastructure is missing or out of date — which matters most exactly when things go wrong. OpenStreetMap fixes that by letting anyone contribute, and organizations like the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team turn those contributions into something responders rely on. I’m not out mapping disaster zones myself. My part is the plumbing — the trackers, the uploaders, the small utilities that get a location from someone’s phone into a system that can act on it. It’s unglamorous, and that’s exactly the kind of work I like: when the pipeline works, the map gets a little better for everyone.

My OSM repositories

OSMTracker experiments and related tooling on GitHub.