As a cartographer, I began my career already in the digital era, and I have always been fascinated by beautiful web maps and their power to reveal data insights that go far beyond traditional paper-based cartography. Naturally, I became interested in creating my own.

My first attempt was with the qgis2web plugin, which introduced me to Leaflet and OpenLayers. I quickly realized that if I truly wanted to go beyond templates, I would need to learn how to code it. Although I had some programming experience, I considered myself — and still consider — an average developer. JavaScript felt intimidating at the time (this was the pre-AI era, when Stack Overflow was the primary lifeline).

During that period, Jupyter Notebooks and Google Colab were becoming very popular, and that’s when I discovered Folium. It was love at first sight. With just three lines of Python code, I could generate a full-fledged HTML file containing all the JavaScript, CSS, and markup that previously felt so foreign to me.

From there, I started exploring the colorful world of interactive features: clickable tooltips with charts, hover highlighting, search bars — the full package. I built my first prototype for a project called OpenSidewalkMap, which focused on sidewalk geometries. I began with a small dataset — just eight street blocks — and it looked absolutely beautiful.

But who wants only eight blocks when you could map an entire city?

That’s when I learned about scaling. To handle large datasets efficiently, you need tiles — vector tiles, specifically. And that’s when the tiling nightmare began. Leaflet is fantastic, but vector tiles are not exactly its strongest feature. I experimented with several adaptations, none of them fully satisfying.

By that point, I had already heard about MapLibre and its highly optimized rendering engine. I also discovered the relatively new PMTiles format, which fit perfectly with many of my projects and integrates seamlessly with MapLibre. So I migrated.

Today, I write MapLibre code "directly". But what about the “old Kaue,” who just wanted to create a web map with three lines of Python?

That question led to MapLibreum.

Well — not exactly me alone. If you look at the official Folium repository, you’ll see more than 160 contributors. Building something similar as a solo developer would be unrealistic. So I took a different path: I used AI agents to help me do the work.

What started as pure curiosity — a side project I would never otherwise have had time to pursue — evolved into an important laboratory for learning how to effectively use AI agents in large, real-world projects.

And in our presentation, I’ll tell you all about it.