Hiker Atlas

Hey! I'm Colin. This is a hobby project, so set your expectations accordingly. You might want to check out the map, showing an extract of the planet.

This project is open source, see hikeratlas on GitHub.

Blog

Anger and hubris. Like most good things, these two emotions drove me to build Hiker Atlas.

Anger: despite being a paying AllTrails subscriber, I somehow got my paid account on their WAF blacklist. It's been fixed, but at the time, it felt absurd. The data is mostly open source or crowd-sourced. I'm paying them for this privilege, and yet they block me?

Hubris: hey, they're just showing open source information, how hard could it be?

Turns out, it's a little involved. This blog documents my journey as I learn about open-source cartography, circa 2024. Hope it's helpful to someone!

• 2024-01-14: Glossary of web mapping terms
• 2024-01-14: 30,000 foot overview of how mapping works
• 2024-01-18: Lua tricks: let multiple threads write to a file safely
• 2024-01-21: tilemaker: build an autosuggest index
• 2024-01-28: automating builds with GitHub Actions
• 2024-02-03: cartographic generalization: ranking features with qrank
• 2024-10-05: tile-smush, a faster tile-join for MBTiles files
• 2024-10-06: tilemaker: node_keys and way_keys
• 2026-10-31: the AIpocalypse - impact of Claude Code