A geospatial career journey
Open source geospatial tools are good. I have been making some form of that argument for most of my career, especially on this blog. The mature projects are equal to or better than their proprietary alternatives. The communities that build and maintain them represent some of the best technical talent working in this space. None … Continue reading Sovereignty and Open Source
[Author's Note: At the time of this writing, I am a member of the OSM US Advisory Council. This post reflects my personal analysis and opinion. It has not been endorsed by OSM US, and is not intended to reflect their views.] Recently, a proposal submitted to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) set off a … Continue reading The Siren Song of Global Identifiers
In February 2026, Gary Gale published a brief post describing a problem that, on its face, looked mundane. A volunteer‑maintained mapping project called Vaguely Rude Places had experienced an abrupt surge in traffic. Daily requests jumped from the low thousands to the hundreds of thousands. There was no corresponding spike in public interest, no viral … Continue reading When Geospatial Is Consumed at AI-Scale
Not everything I do these days is with AI. Lately, I've had the opportunity to do some work with Mergin Maps as part of my consulting work. It is a field data collection application by Lutra Consulting that builds on top of QGIS. The mobile collection app itself is available for iOS and Android through … Continue reading XLSForm with Mergin Maps
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