Dr Fred Calef III has the unofficial title of "Keeper of Maps" at NASA JPL, he's the Lead Mapping Specialist for most of JPL's Mars Rover missions, most recently that being Perseverance & Curiosity. But to land -and navigate- a rover, one needs maps, and Fred makes them.

Markus Bergelt is a motion designer and the person behind GEOLayers, a video editing plug-in simplifying the creation of map animations in Adobe After Effects. Most map animations you’ve seen online are most likely made with this plug-in. We touch what makes map tricky to animate, how to simplify the process, the state of software development and of course, about Markus’s business model behind it all

Volodymyr Agafonkin is the creator of Leaflet, an open-source JS mapping library started in 2008 that is used pretty much everywhere on the Internet today. We end up nerding out on what makes rendering maps online tricky but also so endlessly interesting. Volodymyr lives in Ukraine, a country shaken by a war for the past few years, which we also talk about.

Qiusheng Wu is an Associate Professor in Geography, an active open source contributor behind projects like geemap, leafmap or segment-geospatial also sharing tutorials on his popular Youtube channel. Qiusheng has a desire to teach, share and lower the barrier to entry to geospatial, all things I'm always curious to talk more about

Ryan Abernathey is a Climate Scientist, open-source software developer and the CEO & co-founder of Earthmover, a company trying to simplify how scientific computing is done. Ryan also co-founded the Pangeo project in 2016, one of the major efforts to build better tools for scientific computing today.

Gilberto Camara was the director of INPE, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research from 2005 to 2012, working there 35y in total and leading the use of satellite imagery to fight deforestation in Brazil, leading to what Nature declared “One of the biggest environmental wins of the 2000s”

Thomas Ager worked for 30y at the National Geospatial Agency on Radar satellite images and recently released ‘The Essentials of SAR’ a book breaking down Synthetic Aperture Radar for, as he puts it, “non electrical engineers”

Brian McClendon was one of the earliest investors & later VP of Engineering at Keyhole, which got acquired by Google in 2004. Brian become VP of Engineering and led Google Geo, overlooking the development of Google Earth & Google Maps. He also worked at Uber & is now at Niantic, which you might know for thri most popular app: Pokemon Go

Ariel Seidman is one of the co-founders of Hivemapper, a company building a map through selling dashcams & paying contributing drivers with the aim of competing with Google Maps. Ariel has a long history of mapping, working on Map & Search at Yahoo in the mid 2000s.

It's the end of the year, so time for Christmas sweaters & looking back on the year through 12 conversations ranging from advice for people wanting to build things, discussing academia & companies, thinking about the roles of maps in the world and many others.

Jason Boone runs the Boone Loves Videos YouTube Channel with nearly 100k subscribers, teaching people visual effects & map animations. This led him to work with some of the biggest YouTubers out there, including Johnny Harris. We talked about running an online business teaching people map animations, using maps to tell stories and Jason's recent dive into tech startups.

Javier de la Torre started a Biologist Researcher, went on to start Vizzuality and later Carto where he is now. Javier works at the intersection mapping, software based companies & geospatial. He is also one of the founding members of the Tierra Pura Foundation focused on mitigation and adaptions tactics to climate change.