On the 10th June 2024 I gave a presentation to LRUG, the London Ruby Users Group, about being a software maintainer for the OpenStreetMap website codebase. The description of the talk was:
It’s been a long-term goal of mine to see if we can get the OpenStreetMap Website and API running on Heroku.
Recently, my coding attention has drifted towards the OpenStreetMap API. The venerable version 0.6 API celebrated its 10th birthday earlier this year, so it’s had a good run - clocking up double the age of all previous versions combined!
June was a busy month for my ongoing development work on OpenStreetMap.
We’re making steady progress with improving the OpenStreetMap codebase. Although it’s been a busy year for me, I managed to wrap up the moderation pull request, and it was merged and deployed in mid June. Lots of different people have worked on this over the years, starting way back as a GSoC project in 2015! It was great to finally get it integrated into the site.
Last summer I finished a large refactoring, and thought it would be nice to change tack, and so I decided to try to push through a new feature as my next project. Refactoring is worthwhile, but it has a long-term pay-off. On the other hand, new features show progress to a wider audience, and so new features are another avenue to getting people interested and involved in development.
After over 50 Pull Requests spread over the last 9 months, I’ve finally finished refactoring the openstreetmap-website test suite to use factories instead of fixtures. Time for a celebration!
Time for a short status update on my work on the openstreetmap-website codebase. It’s been a few months since I started refactoring the tests and the work rumbles on. A few of my recent coding opportunities have been taken up with other projects, including the blogs aggregator, the 2017 budget for the OSMF Operations Working Group (OWG), and the new OWG website.
One of my projects over the winter has been upgrading the blogs.openstreetmap.org feed aggregator. This site collects OpenStreetMap-themed posts from a large number of different blogs and shows them all in one place. The old version of the site was certainly showing its age. The software that powered it, called PlanetPlanet hasn't been updated for over 10 years, and can't cope with feeds served…
The codebase that powers OpenStreetMap is older than any other Rails project that I work on. The first commit was in July 2006, and even then, that was just a port of an existing pre-rails system (hence why you might still see it referred to as "The Rails Port") It's a solid, well-tested and battle-hardened codebase. It's frequently updated too, particularly its dependencies. But if you know where…