We’re making steady progress with improving the OpenStreetMap codebase. Although it’s been a busy year for me, I managed to wrap up the moderation pull request, and it was merged and deployed in mid June. Lots of different people have worked on this over the years, starting way back as a GSoC project in 2015! It was great to finally get it integrated into the site.

Last week mavl, one of our site moderators, posted that nearly a thousand issues were logged by OSM volunteers in the first 3 months – at an average rate of over 10 per day! That’s a lot more than I was expecting, so future development ideas could involve working with the OpenStreetMap moderators to support their workflows.

Also in June, the Ruby for Good team picked us as one of their projects for their annual development event. A bunch of good stuff came out of that, in particular a new “quad_tile” gem, which builds one of our C extensions automatically during gem installation, and therefore saves new developers from having to deal with that.

In addition, they also kick-started work on our new authorisation framework, based on CanCanCan, which I outlined previously. It’s taken longer than I would have liked to get that ready, but the code was merged and deployed last week, and I’ve started refactoring the rest of our controllers to use it. This will allow us to remove a lot of home-grown authorisation code and use a standard approach instead, which means less custom code to maintain as well as being more familiar to new developers. I see this authorisation framework as a key enabler for future projects – we’ll be able to develop new features faster, while making sure that only the right people have access.

Another recent upgrade has been to set up and start using the Active Job framework. This allows tasks to be run in the background, and is now a standard part of Ruby on Rails. We’re already using it for sending notification emails, so now if you post a comment to a popular diary entry, you don’t need to wait while the system sends dozens of notification emails to all the subscribers – they are queued and dealt with separately. A small improvement, perhaps, but the job framework will really come alive when we start using it for processing GPX trace uploads. I hope to have more news on that soon.

If you want to follow our progress more closely, or get involved in the development, head over to our GitHub repository for full installation and development guides, along with all the issues and pull requests that we are dealing with!