All new, beautiful Maps! 🗺️ - April 2023 - Nominated for Forbes 30 under 30 🎉

Userbase growth has been continuing to climb, going from the 1k milestone at the beginning of the month to ~1,260 users today at the end of April 2023. With that, I'm very excited to announce the release of an all-new map update. This brings a much-needed level of polish, going from low-resolution raster-based map tiles to high-resolution WebGL-rendered vector-based Maps 🎉

Also, I'm very excited and honored to share that the work on this project has resulted in my referral and nomination for Forbes 30 under 30 by a long-standing friend and prior winner Tyler Menezes. There's no guarantee that I'll win however the referral and nomination alone is incredibly touching and was a pleasant Friday afternoon surprise. I would not be where I am nor would this project exist as it is today without the support of People like Tyler and the incredible community from CodeDay/SRND (StudentRND).

What's New

High-quality, beautiful mapping has been something I've been seeking for years now. The problem is this usually comes with a steep cost, and as a solo, self-funded founder these costs are a cause for concern. The existing solution up to this point has been to use the free public Open Street Maps tile server, that only offers low-resolution raster images. This resulted in the maps looking outdated and unable to meet the fit and finish of the rest of the application.

This is until I learned about the Maplibre-gl-js project and Protomaps. The combination of these two fantastic open-source projects allowed me to produce a high-quality vector-based, graphics-accelerated mapping solution that to me rivals the fit, finish, & polish of the big name solutions like Mapbox, Google Maps, etc... all at a negligible cost and more freedom for how the map tiles are used and cached. I cannot recommend this combo enough and encourage you to check it out. I've also chosen to become a sponsor of the incredible Protomaps project and recommend that you check it out too.

The open-source Protomaps map tiling solution is key to this and as a fellow solo, self-funded founder I feel a deep kinship and respect for the excellent work done by Brandon Liu on Protomaps. Brandon currently has a goal of reaching 20 monthly sponsors to help cover hosting costs and the sustainability of the Protomaps project and I'm proud to have Lazztech as the 10th sponsor of this incredible work!

I encourage you to update your iOS, or Android app installation, and or check the beautiful new maps for yourself on the Lazztech Hub app on web or mobile at https://hub.lazz.tech/!

What's Upcoming

Discovering this new mapping solution required me to change course a bit and make sure to incorporate it into the Lazztech Hub app. This allowed me to check off the "Retina resolution map tiles" item from the "Ongoing bug fixes/improvements" section at the bottom of the roadmap. This coming month I'm undecided on exactly which item I'll work next, though at the time of writing this I think it would be nice to finish the "Finish events feature" section with "Geofences at events for presence count" and likely take what remaining time I can find in the month to clean up some tech debt. Going forward I'd also like to make it a priority to ensure that the app and PWA caching are configured optimally to support use cases like off-grid festivals. I'll announce what improvements are made here as they're implemented.

Lazztech Hub Roadmap

• finish events feature
  • 03-25-2023 ✅ Min & Max event capacity
  • 02-22-2023 ✅ Events at hubs
  • 02-22-2023 ✅ Prefilled hub as location when creating an event from the hub page
  • 01-19-2023 ✅ Admin invitees (ability to remove invitees)
  • 01-16-2023 ✅ Export calendar event ics web
  • 01-15-2023 ✅ Add events to calendar
  • 01-04-2023 ✅ Duplicate prior events
  • 01-02-2023 ✅ Lock event time selection to 15 or 30 minute increments
  • 01-02-2023 ✅ Default end date for events to one hour after the start set
  • Geofences at events for presence count
  • Sync with calendar?
    • canceled pending user research
  • Import event from calendar
    • canceled until I can validate that this would be used
• Improve invites
  • 02-02-2023 ✅ Invite everyone from an existing Hub or Event
  • 01-17-2023 ✅ Add search to people invite section
  • 01-12-2023 ✅ Alphabetize invite people section
  • 01-9-2023 ✅ QR invites
  • Import contacts for easier inviting
    • canceled until I can validate that this would be used
• Improve Onboarding
  • ✅ remove walkthrough slides
  • new guided walkthrough
• Rework notifications
  • 01-17-2023 ✅ Minimize notifications to only the essentials
    • Hub activation
    • Hub invites
    • Event invites
  • Fix duplicate notifications
  • Interactive notifications
  • Robust per Hub/Event notification preferences
  • Robust global notification preferences
  • Red notification count circle
  • Opt in check in / check out notifications
• Media sharing
  • Media sharing on hubs
  • Media sharing on events
  • User tagging in media
  • Media explore page
• Publicly listed hubs & events
  • Search for public content
  • Filter public content by city/state
• Ongoing bug fixes/improvements
  • 04-30-2023 ✅ Retina resolution on map tiles (vector maps)
    • canceled due to cost though may revisit later
    • revisited and solved on 04-30-2023 with open source vector based maping solution 🎉
  • 04-30-2023 ✅ Fix rounded corners on map card
  • 03-25-2023 ✅ New lines in hub/event descriptions
  • Easier toggling of hub activity
  • In app feedback/bug reporting
  • URL & socials on profile
  • URL on hub or event
  • Share user device battery level
  • "Automagic Check in / Check out" device setting status page
  • Share if user has geofences enabled for a given hub