FOSS4G, the annual international OSGeo conference on open source mapping software, is coming up in just three weeks in Denver, CO. We’ll be there talking about our mapping stack, as well as some of the open source tools that power it.

Along with Iván Sánchez Ortega, I’ll run an advanced workshop on how to leverage Mapnik to build scalable mapping applications. Participants will learn how Mapnik can be used as a modular toolkit via Javascript/NodeJS and Python, how to achieve top level rendering performance with it, and how to design beautiful Carto CSS stylesheets using TileMill — an open source map design studio. Since TileMill recently added PostGIS support, I will also show how to render OpenStreetMap data in it via PostGIS.

Because the workshop machines are Windows, each participant will be equipped with a VirtualBox machine with the latest Ubuntu release with Mapnik, TileMill, PostGIS, and OpenStreetMap data running and ready to go. Download the TileMill 0.3 VM at support.mapbox.com if you’d like to play around with the exact machine we will be using. This three hour workshop will take place Tuesday, September 13 at 8:00 am, and you can find out more about it on the FOSS4G website. You must also pre-register for this and all workshops, and we recommend you do that soon before they fill up. I will also post tutorials from the workshop online and available to download after the conference.

For those attending the FOSS4G workshops, we recommend checking out two other workshops in particular. On Monday Kate Chapman, president of the U.S. Chapter of OpenStreetMap, will lead a workshop on how to contribute to disaster response and humanitarian mapping. Also on Tuesday afternoon, after our Mapnik workshop, Chris Helm of FortiusOne is leading a talk on NodeJS called There’s JavaScript in your backend: Front to Back JavaScript with NodeJS that looks to be fascinating. You can find a full list of workshops here.

We’ll also be leading two sessions at the FOSS4G conference. Tom will talk about how to turn data into beautiful maps, and AJ will discuss advanced cartography for the web.