A geospatial career journey
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
I can't remember the exact time that I met Paul Ramsey in person and had a conversation with him - it was either at the 2011 FOSS4G in Denver or the inaugural FOSS4GNA in DC the following year - but I clearly remember what he said to me. By then, I had been writing this … Continue reading Long-Form Spatial Writing
As a consultant, I have always placed a premium on the maturity of the technologies I recommend and deploy for my customers. While staying current with innovations, especially in the geospatial space, is a critical part of my work, I believe in letting new technologies develop and stabilize before introducing them into customer workflows. This … Continue reading Cloud, Ready
I started the year with a sense of renewal. By that, I mean that I had cataract surgery the first week of the year and I literally have a new vision for the future. This time last year, I was already down with bronchitis - the result of an unnamed respiratory illness that knocked me … Continue reading Onward to 2025
This week, I had the opportunity to attend OGC@30, the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The early 1990s were the very beginning of my professional career and they were also a time of geospatial innovation. Many of the pioneers from that time, including OGC founder David … Continue reading Thirty Years of OGC
I flew home from St. Louis yesterday, returning from the FOSS4G North America conference. I took a different approach to the conference this year than I did in 2023. Rather than moderate sessions and participate in a lot of on-site logistics, I sat in on more sessions so I got to see a lot more … Continue reading A FOSS4GNA Savasana
In the 18+ months since I stepped back into the world of geospatial consulting and services, one of the most striking things I have noticed is the seemingly increased tribalism in the geospatial space. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, given the increased tribalism of society in general, but that’s a different post that won’t get … Continue reading Walls and Bridges
As I mentioned earlier this year, I spend a lot of time working in Python these days. More and more, my work seems to be about performing geospatial tasks with the minimal amount of geospatial dependencies possible. My most recent work has been generating contours from a set of sampled elevation points. I’ve done this … Continue reading Just Enough Geospatial
A couple of weeks ago, I had a need to return GeoJSON from PostGIS. This is something I've done many times, but I usually do the final formatting in the application/API layer with Javascript or Python. Basically, my workflow has been to SELECT, using the built-in ST_AsGeoJSON function to convert the geometry to GeoJSON. I … Continue reading Producing GeoJSON with SQL
Early in my career, I dealt with a requirement to post-process a corpus of existing documents to "geocode" them. This meant identifying the locations referenced in each document, calculating a minimum bounding rectangle (MBR), and writing the MBR, the file path, and some associated ID into a database, so that documents could be surfaced via … Continue reading Simple Geocoding with ChatGPT