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
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