I’ve been building a real-life Marauder’s Map using Dawarich as the backend for the location history.

I’ve got about 10 years of location data, and I wanted a more fun way to look back through old journeys than just opening a normal map and looking at a line. The idea is that I can pick an old date or trip and watch myself move across the map again.

It also works with real-time location data, so I can either look back through old journeys or my partner can see where I am in real time.

My phone sends location data through OwnTracks into Dawarich, then the Marauder’s Map pulls that data into a custom MapLibre frontend and handles the playback, animation and styling.

I should also say that I vibe coded quite a lot of this. I’m an engineer, not a web developer, so a lot of the process has been me working out what I want, giving Codex/ChatGPT increasingly specific instructions, testing it, breaking it, fixing it, and gradually getting it to where it is now.

At the moment it has:

* OwnTracks to Dawarich for location collection
* Around 10 years of historical location data
* Historical journey playback
* Real-time location viewing
* MapLibre for rendering
* Custom parchment/watercolour map styling
* Multiple people and tracks
* A mobile/PWA interface that I’m still improving

Dawarich has been really useful for this because it handles the location storage, importing and history side of things, while I can treat the Marauder’s Map as a completely custom frontend.

The main thing I’m working on now is the map styling. I originally used watercolour raster tiles, but I’m moving towards vector tiles so I can properly control how roads, paths, buildings, labels and everything else are rendered.

It’s basically the result of having far too much location history, wanting a fun way to explore it, and doing a lot of vibe coding.

Happy to share more about how the Dawarich integration, historical playback or live tracking works if anyone is interested. I will be putting it on Github when it is a little more refined.

I built a real-life Marauder’s Map