Daniel Krol

I am a software developer. Most of my experience has been in backend web and API development in Python, Go, and Node.js. More recently I've done a touch of blockchain work. I rather enjoy Haskell, but I haven't had any industry experience there yet.

I'm a big proponent of Free/Open Source Software and user autonomy. I have started spending a lot more of my time on applications for Sandstorm.io. I'd like to orient my career toward Free Software development as much as I can.

I'm working on a fully self-hosted OpenStreetMap based application for Sandstorm.io. I came up with the name "Share-A-Map" without thinking much about it and now I'm probably stuck with it. You can see it here.

Sandstorm makes self-hosting about as easy as you can get. I previously created a Sandstorm package for an existing application called Kiwix, which allows for fully self-hosting mirrors of open data sites like Wikipedia or Project Gutenberg. I liked the "off-the-grid" aspect of Kiwix, and thought it would be an interesting offering for Sandstorm.

So now I'm on to the next frontier of "off-the-grid", a fully self-hosted map. Self-hosted OpenStreetMap setups do exist, but they're not necessarily so easy. They're getting easier, but IMO not as easy as Sandstorm can be. I also figure that people may want to collaborate on maps in a semi private way, which isn't really possible with offline phone applications like OrganicMaps. So that's the use case I'm targeting. As such, I'm not merely packaging someone else's application like Kiwix, this is a brand new application (albeit leaning heavily on lots of great libraries and tools from the OpenStreetMap ecosystem).

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