A geospatial career journey
I first encountered the term "agent" more than 20 years ago, when I was working on an agent-based modeling system for simulating infrastructure inter-dependencies. Imagine an agent representing a power plant that has gone offline and an agent representing a telecommunications end office switching itself to battery backup and tracking how many simulation cycles the … Continue reading How OOP Helped Me Understand AI Agents
One of the advantages of writing a blog for nearly twenty years is that you can go back and see how some of the things you wrote about have held up over time. Suffice it to say there are a number of posts that tempt me to hit the delete key. There were times when … Continue reading “Post GIS” Revisited
I have said repeatedly throughout my career that the effective use and adoption of technology requires a deep understanding of your own business processes and workflows. This is true regardless of the nature of the technology: proprietary or open-source, SaaS or cloud or on-prem, web or desktop or mobile, SQL or not. None of these … Continue reading AI Still Requires You to Understand Your Business
It's been about a year since we rolled out GeoFeeds, a spatial new aggregator along the lines of the old Planet Geospatial. During that time, it's been humming along, and we've added about 90 blog feeds to it. It provides a single, rolling, aggregated feed of posts from those blogs over the previous year. I've … Continue reading GeoFeeds: Now with MCP
I've been doing more (a lot more) with Claude Code lately. With its subagents and skills features, it's become more customizable and powerful. I can really dial it into doing things the way I want them done, which accelerates my development and quickly gets me to where I am focused on important behaviors, rather than … Continue reading Spatial Analysis with Claude Code
As I’ve recounted before, what became HIFLD started as the M: drive on a Windows server in a musty government building in Norfolk, VA. Early exercises made it obvious that the data on our M: drive didn’t match the data on other M: drives. They also made it clear that sharing data, especially across 2002-vintage … Continue reading Data Preservation: Let the Pain Guide You
Earlier in my career, I was working on an infrastructure protection task and we were reconciling data from several sources that addressed the same road network. The data from the locality was authoritative, but it lacked some information we needed so we were conflating other data to the linework. I commented on the general lack … Continue reading Metadata Rising
I wasn’t looking forward to FOSS4G North America. The political and economic situation in the US made it much more difficult to attract sponsorship dollars. The government shutdown and the preceding sets of arbitrary and capricious cuts to government staff made attendance hard to predict. Three weeks prior to the event, it was not at … Continue reading FOSS4GNA, 2025, and Life
Once again, FOSS4G North America is bringing together the people shaping the future of open-source geospatial technology. This year, it takes place November 3–5 at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia, just a few miles from the centers of federal decision-making where open data, open tools, and open collaboration appear to be increasingly at risk. … Continue reading You Should Attend FOSS4G North America
I mentioned in my previous post that, at a previous career stop, I built open-source support into our IT lifecycle. Specifically, we used QGIS. The primary reason we made that choice is that we were a Mac shop. It's true we could have run ArcGIS Pro inside Parallels, but I didn't see the need to … Continue reading Supporting Open Source: A Case Study