A geospatial career journey
Summaries of selected talks from FedGeoDay 2026, Day 1, April 2026, US Census Bureau, Suitland, MD Once again, I served on the FedGeoDay organizing committee this year. FedGeoDay continues to be one of the higher-value events on my calendar, and this year was no exception. With a focus on data preservation and federal data stewardship, … Continue reading FedGeoDay 2026: Four Talks Worth Your Attention
Open a dataset of building footprints for a mid-sized city in sub-Saharan Africa. The polygons are clean. They snap to grid, close correctly, and sit at plausible addresses. Run them through any geometry validator and they pass. Load them in QGIS and they look, to every reasonable inspection, like a map. Some of them may … Continue reading Plausibility Is Not Provenance
I first saw the typewriter when I rolled up the door of the shed. That small shed with the gabled roof and T-111 exterior had been there since the mid-1990s. My father built it with two sections. One was for his workshop and the other was intended to be my mother’s sewing room. I’m not … Continue reading The Typewriter
Note: This post is the second in a four-part series leading to the 20th anniversary of this blog. I was recently at a conference that was primarily focused on climate risk. One particular panelist caught my attention when talking about analyzing vulnerabilities by first creating a digital twin and then using an AI model to … Continue reading Twenty Years, Part Two
Following up on my previous post, I built a new Claude skill to take advantage of the increasing wealth of data online in cloud-native formats like GeoParquet. Given that DuckDB can read from such sources in place, I built the skill to use it to perform spatial analysis tasks on specified data sets. Here is … Continue reading Spatial Analysis with Claude, Part 2
When Steve Crocker published RFC 1 on April 7, 1969, he did not present it as doctrine. He described tentative agreements, open questions, and a document offered in expectation of reaction (Crocker, 1969). That posture matters. It is a reminder that stewardship and governance were not late additions to shared technical infrastructure. They were part … Continue reading RFC 1, OGC, and the Long Arc of Technical Stewardship
I have decided that, in the next phase of my career, the most advanced spatial analysis I will perform will be deciding where to park this baby. AI is taking over the entire industry anyway, so I thought I'd use it to make a conceptual rendering of my food truck/semi-retirement plan. The actual truck is … Continue reading And I’m Out
I spent the first five years of my career, from 1993 to 1998, doing mostly AML programming. There was also some AutoLISP, MapBasic, Clipper, and Avenue during that time, but it was mostly AML. In hindsight, that was a fortunate place to begin. I had no real exposure to GIS or geography in college, and … Continue reading Shortening Translation Distance
Over the next several months, I will be making the rounds on my 2026 geo-conference schedule, with stops at FedGeoDay, State of the Map US, and FOSS4G North America. These are not just events I plan to attend. They are communities I have been involved with in different ways, and each one represents a part … Continue reading Geo Roadshow 2026
In 1993, at the very start of my career, I was a newly minted AML developer working on a data automation project. A good bit of the industry’s energy at the time was focused on digitizing vast amounts of geospatial information that still existed in analog form, including mylar, paper maps, and other physical artifacts, … Continue reading Twenty Years, Part One