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
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
UPDATE: This post has been edited to provide the new, user-friendly URL. I've missed Planet Geospatial. I've missed it so much that I messaged James the other day and said we should get it going again. He wholeheartedly agreed and then started going on about perfectly valid stuff like not wanting to wrestle with 15-year-old … Continue reading GeoFeeds Is Online
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
Getting nothing but static, getting nothing but staticStatic filling my attic from Channel Z - The B-52's I joined LinkedIn first. A friend recommended it to me at the time and I signed up on February 11, 2004. Member number 224,376. I made my first attempt at a blog in 2005 and scuttled it after … Continue reading Reclamation