On August 12th, 2025, I made my first edit to OpenStreetMap. It has now been exactly one year since I began editing. Here are some of the coolest things I’ve done in my relatively small amount of time spent on this hobby:

• 3,095 changesets

• 226486 contributions

• Added a “surface=” tag to every primary road, trunk road, and motorway in Virginia

• Made changes in 64 countries

• Procrastinated mountains of homework

It felt like this year went by so fast. I still remember the moment I discovered OpenStreetMap and how I got instantly addicted.

I hope to be an active contributor for years to come and meet tons of mappy people like me!

I have been mapping on OpenStreetMap for a little over 11 months now. However, OpenStreetMap is not where my love for mapping started. 7 months beforehand, I started editing Google Maps. Every time I had a minute of free time, whether at my computer or on my phone while going to school, I would trace roads all around the world. I completely stopped doing anything else for fun other than fixing and creating roads.

However, this craze of mine ended on August 12th, 2025. I found out that more than 50% of my edits were being rejected by Google when I knew that all of them were OBJECTIVELY correct. I decided that I was done with Google Maps, but I needed something new to fill the hole that mapping had in my heart. That’s when I discovered OpenStreetMap 15 minutes later. I knew I had heard that name somewhere, so I decided to check it out.

Before I even completed the tutorial, I was hooked. While before I could only map walking paths, now I could map literally anything I want. Even the concept of mapping buildings was something I had to get adjusted to due to how small the number of things I could map on Google Maps was. I spent the rest of my day figuring out the mapping capabilities of the iD editor. The next day, I spent the entire day mapping and seeing what others had already mapped (spoiler alert: a lot).

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