A geospatial career journey
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
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
One of the advantages of writing a blog for nearly twenty years is that you can go back and see how some of the things you wrote about have held up over time. Suffice it to say there are a number of posts that tempt me to hit the delete key. There were times when … Continue reading “Post GIS” Revisited
It's been about a year since we rolled out GeoFeeds, a spatial new aggregator along the lines of the old Planet Geospatial. During that time, it's been humming along, and we've added about 90 blog feeds to it. It provides a single, rolling, aggregated feed of posts from those blogs over the previous year. I've … Continue reading GeoFeeds: Now with MCP
I've been doing more (a lot more) with Claude Code lately. With its subagents and skills features, it's become more customizable and powerful. I can really dial it into doing things the way I want them done, which accelerates my development and quickly gets me to where I am focused on important behaviors, rather than … Continue reading Spatial Analysis with Claude Code
Earlier in my career, I was working on an infrastructure protection task and we were reconciling data from several sources that addressed the same road network. The data from the locality was authoritative, but it lacked some information we needed so we were conflating other data to the linework. I commented on the general lack … Continue reading Metadata Rising
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
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…