Mapbox is one of the companies I respect a lot. They are really undervalued in terms of their contribution to many other companies who utilize both their services (tiles, data, etc) as well as high quality open source mapping frameworks.
And almost everything they have done is open source, with lots of blog posts and knowledge sharing on how stuff is done.
I work at a drone company and most of our stuff (UI related) is built on top of Mapbox. Couldn't do it without them.
They had an interesting start. They started as Development Seed[1] a Drupal development house in and around DC that specialized in non-profit, NGO, and government websites, web apps. They were working on a lot of Drupal projects using geographic location data. They had some cool stuff and received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Knight Foundation to develop open source mapping projects. I think in the beginning, 6 years ago, they used OpenLayers[2], started creating their own tile sets and MapBox grew out of that. One of the projects the Knight Foundation sponsored is Managing News[3] which never really took off (awesome technology came out of the project but it was kinda cheesy) but all the founders of MapBox heavily developed it including Will White, Alex Barth, Young Hahn, Jeff Miccolis, and Tom MacWright. As Development Seed matured they stopped wanting to store configuration in the database which was one part of a huge battle between Dries Buytaert and Earl Miles and the Development Seed crew who subsequently dropped Drupal almost all of a sudden, stopped supporting their products (responsibly as Phase 2 picked them up), PHP, and became an early adopter of Node.js. That's when MapBox was spun from Development Seed. (I can't verify anything I say is true.)
1. Development Seed created a heat map of crime in DC[1] and wanted dark tiles. So 3 of the founders, Alex Barth, Jeff Miccolis, and Tom MacWright created the Nice Map module[2] as a tile (WMS) management client for Drupal.
2. Development Seed uses Mapnik to manage their WMS server [3]
3. Development Seed started to share tile sets for maps hosted on AWS on Mapbox.com.[4]
4. The MapBox product is created and effort is put into it.[5]
5. They created Maps on a Stick and iOS client apps [6]
6. TileMill is released so people can create their own map tiles[7]
7. Development jumps from Drupal and the LAMP stack to Node.js and MabBox.[8]
I also work in the drone industry and can't believe how much better Mapbox's solutions are than anything else out there. It's not even remotely close on any level. It's basically the tool I've been dreaming of for the past ten years, plus maybe a little extra magic I hadn't dreamed of.
As someone who has routinely used MapBox for various projects. I completely agree, it's one of those amazing gems no one really acknowledges.
In the mean time, I'm excited to see how this plays out. Seeing as how Human is an "activity monitor", I'm wondering if this will develop into something bigger.
And almost everything they have done is open source, with lots of blog posts and knowledge sharing on how stuff is done.
I work at a drone company and most of our stuff (UI related) is built on top of Mapbox. Couldn't do it without them.