TomTom Developers Year-End Reflection & Looking Ahead to 2022

2021 is coming to an end – let’s reflect on the past year and look ahead at what 2022 has in store for TomTom Developers and our developer community.

Happy Holidays, Devs!

This fall, the TomTom Developer Portal turned 4! The portal was created in 2017 from the idea of making our maps easily accessible to all developers. In 2021, we worked on creating better documentation, more examples, and various use cases and case studies – all with the goal of making it easier to build your project. We also continued highlighting ways you can use TomTom with new platforms, tools, and frameworks, and continue to provide educational content within the fleets and logistics and on-demand spaces.

From delivery apps to taxi services, from insurance to construction, to fun side projects like building a fitness tracker app or mapping Star Wars filming locations, we made sure to give you a variety of ways to build with our Maps APIs.

2021: The New Normal?

While many had hopes that this year would signify the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, that proved to be not the case. While this year has had some ups and downs for navigating COVID worldwide, one positive has been information, a.k.a. data. More data has meant more power, and more power to analyze movement data to help us continue to tackle day-to-day living within the pandemic.

TomTom map and traffic data and Maps APIs continued to be utilized by numerous publications to track movement data, both for lockdowns as well as indications that the economy was recovering. TomTom also continued to provide telematics, logistics, and transportation industries with tools to keep the world moving.

We Kept Updating Our Products

We started out the year by moving the Maps SDK for Web v6 to General Availability, adding the ability to:

• Style all map layers at once & import it into Maps SDK

• Quickly access POI data powered by Foursquare

• Utilize 14 new examples to impress your users with an interactive map experience

Next, in the spring, we celebrated Earth Day by revamping the Map Display API, featuring new natural features, city and street labels, color palettes, and more organized points of interest (POIs).

Lastly, we announced Matrix Routing API v2, Snap to Roads API, and the Waypoint Optimization API, all in public preview, enabling users to do even more with their on-demand apps.

We Continued to Build Our Community

Something that has been at the forefront of our minds this year is continuing to build our developer community.

One way we did this was collaborating with developers from the YouTube community. Anya from Code with Anya Kubów built a distance matrix routing app in React, demonstrating how to optimize multiple deliveries by travel time.

We also did a collaboration with Robert from TipsWithPunch where he walked through how to add a free TomTom map to your WordPress website.

Our own developer advocates, Jose and Olivia, continued to create video tutorials on how to make the most of the Maps APIs. We also grew our subreddit r/TomTom and explored connecting with other developers on Quora, dev.to, Hashnode, and Medium.

Lastly, we launched two monthly blog series on our developer blog: the TomTom Mapmakers series, and our monthly content roundups. The goal of the Mapmakers series is to highlight the people behind the products and serve as a resource and inspiration for other developers in the community, while the content roundups serve as a repo of all of our favorite content from the past month, both created by us and the larger developer community.

We Hit the Virtual Event Circuit

Virtual events continued into 2021, and we made sure to participate in many this year in the on-demand and fleets and logistics industries. Some of our favorites were:

On June 10, we participated in a webinar at Move Asia, discussing innovation in the last mile with a focus on new technologies and methods for on-demand services. TomTom Head of APAC Sales Arnold Meijer spoke along with panelists from Ninja Van, Grab Singapore, and Happy Fresh.

From September 27-28, TomTom participated as a sponsor at this in-person event in Dordrecht, Netherlands – our first in-person event since Dev Week 2020. We had a booth along with co-sponsor Hastig. Jeroen Brouwer presented on Data-driven to a Livable City.

On September 30, we hosted our own webinar on how ETAs work and how to make them work for you with Developer Evangelist Olivia Vahsen, Product Marketing Manager Anna Borbotko, and Product Manager Sander Pluimers. You can learn more here.

Product Marketing Manager Jonathan Americo spoke at the Spatial Data Science Conference hosted by CARTO on October 27. His session was titled TomTom traffic analytics data as an input for mobility solutions.

Lastly, in November, college students came together for TomTom's first ever global student hackathon for an entire week of hacking, focusing on three mobility challenges that drivers face every day:

• How can drivers deliver things, food, and people more efficiently?

• How can we help drivers enjoy their time while charging their electric vehicles?

• How can we make group riders’ trips safer and more enjoyable?

Check out this video to learn more about this year's event, and read more about it here.

Onward to 2022

This month, we sent out an updated survey to our readers to get updated feedback on our blog and get ideas for how to improve it more for next year. We’ll also be looking for new ways to showcase projects from our users and will continue providing a variety of tutorials for various levels, frameworks, and use cases.

What were some of your favorite tutorials from this year, and what would you like to see next year? Feel free to leave a comment below or post in our Developer Forum.

Happy holidays and happy mapping! See you in 2022!

Best, TomTom Developers