Quite a while ago I discovered that the Dorset & Wiltshire fire and rescue website had a feed of the latest incidents. What peaked my interest was that they included the GPS coordinates of the incident. I wanted to map these over time and create a heat map.

It was a hack project, so I took the path of least resistance and dropped in Google Maps. I wasn't a fan of having to create a Google Cloud Console account to get an API key to do this, but I wanted to get it working ASAP.

Fast-forward more than 8 years and my dislike of all things Google has grown and so has the choice and maturity of alternative interactive maps.

I choose Leaflet as I've used it a couple of times before. Initially I thought that I would have to jump through some hoops to get the heatmap working, turns out it was just as simple as before. The hardest part was tweaking the colours to my taste.

While I was there I also did a bunch of quality-of-life updates to the whole project.

One less Google dependency in my projects.