A geospatial career journey
It's amazing what you can find when you plug in an old external hard drive. I recently rearranged my desk and realized that one of the external drives on top of my desktop Linux machine had apparently been unplugged for a while. I plugged it in to see what it held, and there were a … Continue reading A Geospatial Time Capsule
Depending on your point of view, "vibe coding" - using generative AI to iteratively develop code by using natural language to describe desired functionality - is either revolutionary or the slippery slope to deploying poor, irresponsible software. While both viewpoints have merit, I fall somewhere in the middle. As a programmer who is approaching 50 … Continue reading “Vibe Coding” a Mock API
I'm happy to once again be participating in a DMV GIS Day event. GIS Day is still months away, but Cercana Systems is partnering again with New Light Technologies on a "Midpoint Meetup." Like the inaugural event, it is a free virtual event. The midyear event will be about two hours long and serves as … Continue reading DMV GIS Midpoint Meetup 2025
For the past two years, have been working with a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) provider supporting various data architecture and geospatial activities. This is a classic infrastructure business that cycles through phases of design, construction, and maintenance as the built environment changes. This leads to a lot classic GIS editing over time - which can mean the … Continue reading GeoParquet Backup and Restore
I recently had a project requirement to export the contents of a delta table in Databricks to several formats, including shapefile and file geodatabase, with the output being placed in object storage mounted to DBFS. I set up the logic in a notebook, with the intent to use geopandas, which provides an easy wrapper around … Continue reading Exporting Data with GeoPandas in Databricks