Eric Gundersen on the Future of Development Seed and Mapping

Eric Gundersen of Development Seed talks about the recent acquisition of Open Atrium and Managing News by Phase2 Technology. Gundersen also talks about the future work of DevSeed, which is doing a lot of cutting edge and innovative work in the world of mapping. They recently released Tile Mill, which is a design studio tool that makes it easy to make customized map files and overlays that is built with a lot of open source technology. They also released a free iPad app call MapBox, which can display MBTiles that are generated by Tile Mill or other sources so that you can view the maps natively on your iPad.

Gundersen also talks about the future of Development Seed and Drupal, which is to make sure that their mapping technologies work really well on the Drupal platform. They're also spending a lot of time using technologies like node.js to be able to work with a lot of data-driven websites. I did a Drupal Voices interview with Alex Barth of Development Seed about node.js and why they're using it, and so look to that interview for more information on that.

I think I speak for a lot of people in the Drupal community by saying that I'm very grateful for a lot of the innovation and work that Development Seed has contributed to the Drupal ecosystem. A lot of their ideas and visions for making configuration management easier have led to the proliferation Drupal distributions, and as a bright future of making Drupal easier and easier to use as there can be more of a focus put onto user experience and usability.

It's fun to go back and listen to old Drupal Voices podcasts of people from Development Seed as this was first getting hashed out. For example, this interview with Young Hahn talking about the importance putting exportability of Drupal configurations into PHP code was a prophetic prediction of the Features module, which was created soon after DrupalCon DC. And this interview with Eric Gundersen at DrupalCon Paris was also very prophetic in saying that features and Drupal distributions were going to start exploding in the coming years. Little did I know that Eric knew about the White House moving to Drupal, which happened soon after DrupalCon Paris. It's also interesting to hear Jeff Miccolis and Alex Barth talk about creating Open Atrium after six months after creating the Features module.

So thanks again Development Seed for all that you've given to the Drupal Community!