Top all-time · #1273
Insights and musing from Development Seed
Company blog · developmentseed.org/blogwebdata
Insights and musing from Development Seed is the company blog at developmentseed.org, writing about web and data. Since 2009, 56 different Hacker News readers have linked it 78 times, most often “How We Build CMS-Free Websites”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 1 of 39 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Development Seed's blog for posts on its architecture and tooling, including the static-site approach built on Jekyll and GitHub Pages, the Prose editor, and mapping projects like TileMill and MBTiles.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter called a Development Seed blog post on its static-only website approach a good blog post.1
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 39 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
See our planet better.
Most-linked posts?
- How We Build CMS-Free Websites6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2012-07-27
- Introducing Prose: A Content Editor for GitHub5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-06-25
- Using Jekyll and GitHub Pages for Our Site4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-09-11
- Launching HealthCare.gov (2013)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-10-07
- New Healthcare.gov is Open, CMS-Free2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-03-13
- TileMill: Open Source Map Design2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-02-16
- Amazing mapping: Development Seed launches nicely executed map based website2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-05-23
- /blog/2012/jan/02/major-mapbox-investments-coming-2012/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-01-03
- /blog/2017/01/30/machine-learning-learnings/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-05-10
What Hacker News says?
I develop Lonboard [0], a Python library for plotting large geospatial data. If you have small data (~max 30,000 coordinates), leaflet-based Python libraries like folium and ipyleaflet can be fine, but because Lonboard uses deck.gl for GPU-accelerated rendering, it's 30-50x faster than leaflet for large datasets [1]. [0]: https://developmentseed.org/lonboard/latest/ [1]: https://developmentseed.org/lonboard/latest/h…
Comment linking /lonboard/latest/how-it-works/
on “Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting”Submitted Introducing Prose: A Content Editor for GitHub as a story · 214 points
HN discussionOriginator of MBTiles format here. The initial intentions were moving 100,000s of raster map tiles between computer and mobile device, either over USB or network. Main benefit was avoiding per-file transaction overhead, as well as checksumming potential. Side benefits included a small space savings over filesystem because of block overhead, plus later iterations allowed for de-duplication of e.g. all-blue water map…
Comment linking /blog/2010/oct/08/portable-map-tiles-format-released/
on “SQLite small blob storage: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem”Submitted Using Jekyll and GitHub Pages for Our Site as a story · 79 points
HN discussionDevelopment Seed | Washington D.C. | Cloud Engineer | Full-time, Onsite | https://developmentseed.org/careers/cloud-engineer/ Development Seed is an engineering and design shop based in Washington, DC, Lisbon, Portugal and Ayacucho, Peru. We’re a team of twenty-six developers and designers creating positive social impact with open tech and open knowledge alongside organizations like the World Bank, the Washington Po…
Comment linking /careers/cloud-engineer/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)”Submitted TileMill: Open Source Map Design as a story · 74 points
HN discussionDevelopment Seed | Machine Learning Engineer | Washington, DC + Lisbon, Portugal | Full-Time, On-site Preferred | https://developmentseed.org/careers/machine-learning/ Development Seed seeks an engineer with experience in machine learning. Here, you will work with us to build tools that extract insights from large datasets, especially satellite imagery data. You will help solve pressing social and environmental chal…
Comment linking /blog/2017/01/30/machine-learning-learnings/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2017)”Submitted Libra – The Landsat imagery browser you will love as a story · 46 points
HN discussionWhen I first started using tilemill, I missed that you can create indexes for shapefiles. This turned a 12 hour render into a 15 minute render for my particular use case. The devseed guys show how to do it here : http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/mar/29/speed-optimizati...
Comment linking /blog/2011/mar/29/speed-optimizations-tilemill-shapefile-indexes
on “Tilemill: Maps done right”Submitted SlingshotSMS: A Lightweight Open Source SMS Gateway [Alpha] as a story · 24 points
HN discussionWhen Healthcare.gov was first built, before the "enroll in insurance" feature launched and failed, it was a static site managed by a Github-based editor called Prose.io. https://developmentseed.org/blog/new-healthcare-gov-is-open-... https://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-conten... I have not used prose.io, but the company that built it, Development Seed, is strong. You might have heard of one of thei…
Comment linking /blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content-editor-for-github/
on “Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing”Submitted Power tools for Satellite Imagery as a story · 19 points
HN discussionBasically the answer to all of these questions is that it's easier to decode in the browser. A UTFGrid is just plain JSON, so we can just run it through JSON.parse(). PNG uses zlib compression, so we can get that benefit for free when sending gzip over HTTP. Here's some more design rationale: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/09/21/how-interactivity...
Comment linking /blog/2011/09/21/how-interactivity-works-utfgrid/
on “TileMill — an application for making beautiful maps”Submitted Run your own GitHub Pages as a story · 16 points
HN discussionNews and background on Development Seed's great work: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/jan/02/major-mapbox-inv...
Comment linking /blog/2012/jan/02/major-mapbox-investments-coming-2012/
on “TileMill — an application for making beautiful maps”Submitted How We Build CMS-Free Websites as a story · 8 points
HN discussionPlans for Windows just announced in the 2012 roadmap: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/jan/02/major-mapbox-inv... "Just two months ago, after Node.js added native Windows support, we started testing and porting TileMill to a native Windows application. We plan to release a beta version this quarter"
Comment linking /blog/2012/jan/02/major-mapbox-investments-coming-2012/
on “TileMill — an application for making beautiful maps”Submitted How We Build CMS-Free Websites as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThe perception that Acquia = Drupal is a HUGE problem for both Acquia and the drupal ecosystem. If this perception persists then you can guarantee that more Drupal firms will go the way of Development Seed, who not only stopped working with Drupal for their clients in favor of mapping and data visualization, but who also just released their new site using Jekyll and GitHub pages: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011…
Comment linking /blog/2011/09/09/jekyll-github-pages/
on “The Drupal Crisis”Submitted ElasticSearch and CouchDB for data heavy applications as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYep. This is a good blog post by Development Seed about their static-only website approach: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/07/27/build-cms-free-we...
Comment linking /blog/2012/07/27/build-cms-free-websites/
on “Jekyll 2.0.0 is released”Submitted We Needed Better Cloud Storage for Python So We Built Obstore as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHow does this compare to obstore? [1] [1] https://developmentseed.org/obstore/latest/
Comment linking /obstore/latest/
on “Show HN: S3mini – Tiny and fast S3-compatible client, no-deps, edge-ready”Submitted Launching HealthCare.gov (2013) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI do applaud this kind of work. Better, faster tooling for data as files and moving across runtimes is sorely needed. Two things I would hope to see before I'd start using Vorter is geospatial data support (there's already Geoparquet [1]) and WASM for in-browser Arrow processing. Things like Lonboard [2] and Observable framework [3] rely on Parquet, Arrow and Duckdb files for their powerful data analytics and visual…
Comment linking /lonboard/latest/
on “Show HN: Vortex – a high-performance columnar file format”Submitted Open sourcing PEARL – human-in-the-loop AI for land cover mapping as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'm not sure if this fits all your needs but there seems to be at least some meaningful overlap: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content...
Comment linking /blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content-editor-for-github/
on “Ask HN: Idea Sunday”Submitted Gippy: Fast, powerful processing of large remote sensing datasets as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWeather data is a system where we have a really good understanding of the underlying physics but can’t do enough computation to simulate them in a way that’s detailed enough to make truly accurate predictions. Machine learning is all about finding an unknown function that underlies known data. This is sort of the opposite issue: we know the underlying function but can’t compute it. That said, ML models are being app…
Comment linking /projects/hurricane-intensity/
on “NOAA upgrades the U.S. global weather forecast model”Submitted New Healthcare.gov is Open, CMS-Free as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
