Author of the OP here. I don't have a GIS background in particular; I do have a decade of experience building web mapping applications, and here's some of the foundational software I use:
Thanks for the pointers -- Leaflet I know as the visualization layer that is basically not-mapbox-GL. The rest are new to me, and will crawl through them.
One of the nice out-of-the-box systems I've come across is Pelias[0], what are your opinions on it? It bundles and provides the API so it's one of the things I've thought to self-host if I'm going to. It looks like it doesn't do tiles so I'd need to find something for that?
> I do have a decade of experience building web mapping applications
> I don't have a GIS background in particular;
It's only on HN that you get statements like this, haha, what do you think 10 years of experience building mapping applications is? I building mapping applications is generally what people consider "GIS background" -- if you did GIS but never produced any maps... would the trees make a sound?
Yes, Pelias is a mature project backed by a great team at https://geocode.earth - definitely one of the best options if you need an autocompleting geocoder based on OSM+other data like http://whosonfirst.org
About OSM data extracts, I also run an extracts service at http://protomaps.com/extracts that provides on-demand data updated once a minute.
http://leafletjs.com https://shapely.readthedocs.io/ https://github.com/libgeos/geos https://rasterio.readthedocs.io/ https://gdal.org http://www.angusj.com/delphi/clipper.php