A geospatial career journey
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
You are already using open-source. I've said that time and again to various audiences. The most committed Microsoft and Esri users will immediately balk, but it's easy to knock the objections down. Azure? Linux abounds. Esri? GDAL under the hood. And what does the "Py" in ArcPy stand for? Oh yeah, Python, the open-source programming … Continue reading Unless…
I have no problem with vibe coding. Yes, you can make bad code with it, and quite easily. The worst way to vibe code is to issue a monolithic prompt like "Build a word processor with the features of Microsoft Word." But using techniques like chain-of-thought or plan-and-solve prompting in an iterative manner can yield … Continue reading Vibing Adjacencies