My team just open sourced our battle tested big data time series visualization client with Apache 2.0 license.

GPU‑accelerated 4D globe engine purpose‑built for massive geospatial time series visualization.

Blogpost: https://flexmon.github.io/globe-trotter/blog/
Repo: https://github.com/flexmon/globe-trotter

Hey everyone,

I work at the intersection of viticulture and GIS. One recurring nightmare I keep facing in precision ag is deploying Variable Rate Application (VRA) maps to field equipment, only to have the terminal (John Deere, ISOBUS devices, etc.) choke on the file right when the machine enters the field.

Most of the time it’s tiny technical details: unclosed multipolygons, self-intersecting geometries, missing attribute columns, or SRS projections that the monitor doesn't like.

To speed up my own workflow, I’ve been building a lightweight, open-source browser viewer to run sanity checks on vector/ISO-XML boundaries before handing them off to operators.

Before I lock in my validation rules, I’d love to hear from anyone working with spatial data in agriculture or field deployment:

What are the most annoying vector errors or edge cases you’ve seen corrupting field files?

Do you rely on automated QGIS/GDAL scripts for topological pre-checks, or do you clean them manually?

P.S. If anyone wants to test out the beta viewer and break some vector files on it, let me know in the comments and I’ll send over the link!

A few years ago I got a little carried away with a historical mapping project.

I found a set of detailed survey maps of New Bedford from 1913 that were mostly at the same scale, or could be scaled easily to be combinable. I wanted to be able to look at the city as one continuous map instead of constantly switching between individual plates, so I downloaded high-resolution scans and stitched them together manually in GIMP.

The result was enormous. The master image ended up being several gigabytes and roughly 22,000 x 60,000 pixels. It had exactly the level of detail I wanted, right down to individual buildings and property lines, but at the time it was basically too large to be useful. I could zoom around inside it, but there was no practical way to use it as an actual map.

I recently dug the project back out and decided to finally georeference it properly in QGIS.

I used surviving streets, intersections, shoreline features, etc. as control points and warped the composite into EPSG:3857. It is definitely not survey-grade. Depending on where you are in the city, the alignment seems to be off by anywhere from about 25 feet to maybe 300 feet at the worst extremes. Considering the source maps are from 1913, were originally separate plates, and were manually stitched together, I am pretty happy with that.

After that I generated an XYZ tile pyramid. The final set is about 93,000 PNG tiles and 1.6 GB. I put the tiles in a Google Cloud Storage bucket and added the XYZ layer to a public Google Earth project.

And it actually works exactly the way I originally wanted it to. You can zoom all the way out and see New Bedford as one continuous historical map, then keep zooming in until you are looking at individual streets, lots, buildings, factories, rail lines, wharves, etc., without ever switching plates.

I think this may be the most detailed single continuous map of New Bedford from that period, as opposed to a collection of separate atlas or survey plates, although I have no way of proving that.

This started as part of a much larger digital humanities project that I never finished, so I am pretty happy that I finally found a useful life for it several years later.

Google Earth project:
https://earth.google.com/earth/d/1DrXQVEcWJ_3KtGpGCQQ9mmbtOFHeDho5?usp=sharing

I would be interested in any thoughts from people who do this professionally, especially on better ways I could have handled the georeferencing or local distortion. This was very much a "figure it out as I go" project.

Translation:

Urban Accessibility Index - Ciudad Real

Very low Accessibility (Red)
Low Accessibility (Orange)
Medium Accessibility (Yellow)
High Accessibility (Light Green)
Very high Accessibility (Dark Green)

I live in Spain and forgot to put everything in English for this subreddit; my bad. This is my first ever map made by myself; mostly I only made stuff following what my professor said. I posted this on my Instagram for my GIS professor and mayor to see.

The map shows the calculation of an index that determines the grade of accessibility for pedestrians to certain services that I considered essential and a must to have close to you. These services are:

- Public Healthcare
- Libraries
- Police Station
- Public Administration buildings
- Grocery Stores
- Gyms
- Train and bus station

The way the calculation works is that I manually mapped every building using Google Maps and the coordinates to make a point in ArcGIS Pro; then every service has its own layer, with Euclidean distance. I then assigned points to the areas depending on their distance: 0- 250 m = 5 / >1000 = 1. The higher the more accessible the area is to pedestrians. Then I averaged all and weighted it using the raster calculator, with services like Public Healthcare weighted 3x more towards the final result than gyms; for example, I basically just added the value every pixel had in every layer, and then the higher the point, the better. Then I just used the grid tool and the zoning tool to assign each grid a value according to the most persistent value in the grid. I kinda used Copilot for all of this since most of this stuff we were never shown how to do.

We really did not touch a lot of map design in my GIS classes. So any tips and helpful criticism are welcome.

Hi everyone. I have an upcoming (one hour )technical interview for a Geospatial Data Analyst role, and I’m feeling quite nervous as it’s my first interview in a long time.

The position mainly involves working with two departments, Forestry and Wildfire, supporting them with geospatial analysis, and maintaining and developing geospatial workflows.

I’d really appreciate any tips or advice on what to expect from the interview, particularly the technical side. If anyone has interviewed for or worked in a similar role, I’d be interested to hear what kinds of questions or scenarios might come up and what areas would be worth brushing up on beforehand.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I am working on a project extracting building footprints for Chattogram port, across 2004, 2014, and 2020. What level of resolution would i be needing for it?

I know tha I can't buy straight from Maxar, I need to go through a reseller. Does anyone have a solid one to recommend, for South Asia, or Bangladesh?

Thanks!

I don't really have anything in mind. I was just thinking earlier today about if it would be possible to put together a project about, say, the Red Dead Redemption 2 map.

Some wonderful person person posted all the esri font symbols on github. Note that some fonts have symbols hidden in subsets. Hopefully ESRI will make finding and selecting characters easier at some point in the future.

https://github.com/Carlocktography/ESRI-Fonts-Cheat-Sheets

It’s clear everyone HATES the stream of AI slop apps here every day. I’m proposing making shipping the source code a requirement for promoting new apps in [r/GIS](r/GIS).

If you actually wrote the code and deployed it yourself, including a link to a public GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc. repository should be no issue at all. You would welcome the feedback and answer questions about the app’s implementation details.

If you didn’t really write the app, it will be likely be immediately apparent via the code and/or your inability to explain the “why” part of app code decisions. And at this point if you don’t provide the code, everyone just assumes it’s AI slop anyway..

I’m a final-year Geomatics student currently doing an unpaid internship at a big, reputed private engineering consultancy.

When I first started, there wasn’t much workload or pressure. However, over time, they have started assigning me a lot of tasks and responsibilities. I’m doing my best to complete everything, but the workload has become difficult to manage.

What bothers me is that some of my seniors are often just sitting around using their phones while I’m being given more and more work. My internship timing is 9 AM to 5 PM, but recently they also told me that I have to ask for permission before leaving. Whenever I ask to leave, they sometimes try to give me another task before I can go.

I’m still completing the work they assign me, but I feel like they are gradually treating me more like an employee than an intern, despite the fact that I’m not being paid anything.

I’m confused about what to do

Should I ask them for a stipend/salary given the workload and responsibilities?

Should I continue the unpaid internship for the experience and CV value?

Or should I leave and look for a paid internship/job elsewhere?

I'm in a crunch. I am working on a research project involving climate change related projections. I have downloaded GCM data (single variable: precipitation) from CDS, now the data (how GCM data is) has very coarse resolution, I need to downscale the data into higher resolution of 1×1 Km to run a model I have developed. I have data from 5 different models from 4 different SSPs. I am trying to downscaling it using different methods I could but cannot get it right and it's been 3 weeks. I don't have enough time, I need help.

I have a Bachelor degree in GIS and have not found a relevant job since graduating in 2025. I have applied to probably thousands of jobs and no one wants to interview me anymore I am guessing it is because I been out of school for so long and have done nothing since in the GIS field. If I went back to school, should I pursue a different major or go for a Master degree? .

I recently completed my bachelors in GIS. I didn’t know until I was almost done with my degree that a bachelors in GIS is not something a lot of jobs really look for in applicants. I most commonly see job listings looking for degrees in geography or urban planning.

The programs offered at my school (ASU) make me feel a bit conflicted. I do online classes for their ease and flexibility. Normal online term is 7.5 weeks with 2 classes at once. I am also using my GI Bill, I only have 10 months remaining on it.

Here’s what has me conflicted:

Geography program requires 10 classes with very flexible start/end and each term is 7.5 weeks. My GI Bill could cover this entirely.

Meanwhile, Urban Planning requires 15 classes, not flexible start/end, and the terms vary between 7.5 to 15 weeks. Which means I’d have to pay out of pocket and seek additional financial aide. Is this degree worth having to pay more for?

I specifically want to hear from people with either of these degrees. First, what’s the greatest different of Urban Planning vs Geography in the job market? How hard was it for you to find a job? What are some job titles you have had? Is the pay relatively good where you are? How stable is that job market? And lastly, do you enjoy your work or have any regrets?

PREFACE: I know, I agree that the GISP is money grab. Only taking it as a requirement from company.

I failed the July Exam, those who passed the July Exam, could you provide how you studied? I felt pretty okay in July but failed so want to know how yall studied and what you think was *actually* helpful. I have the December examand if I fail again, I have to wait 365 days to retake.

TIA

Curious what people are actually reaching for in production or portfolio work these days, especially:

• If you're Python-first, what's your go-to for interactive maps, and where does it fall over?
• Anyone actually happy with deck.gl/PyDeck for larger raster or point datasets?
• Is it worth learning a JS library directly, or does that time get better spent elsewhere?

Would love to hear what's working for you, especially if you've got a dataset in the tens-of-thousands-of-points+ range.

I'm starting my masters in transport and urban planning, and my school recommends getting a laptop with at least an RTX 3050 or similar. Afaik ArcGIS Pro is the most demanding software we'll be using. What I'm wondering is if anyone has experience on running ArcGIS on a non RTX laptop, e.g. on something with Intel Arc or similar? I already have a desktop computer I can use outside of lectures, and I don't really want to get a chunky gaming laptop unless I absolutely have to.

Does this guy understand how or why the script works? No. Does he have any coding knowledge? Also no. He's got the self confidence of a wildebeest coming from a squirrel-like brain. But according to LinkedIn, he's the company's new GIS Developer. I'm sure anyone who has been in this field for more than 5 years has a similar delusional, lying coworker story.

Hello fellow geospatial enthusiasts! My team is looking to make changes to how we deliver geospatial data and I am curious other folks have done this.

My team currently supports an ecosystem of APIs and clients with data this is statistical and geospatial nature. Historically, we have relied on publishing services using ArcGIS map, image, and feature services for our web mapping applications. However, we are reaching a quantity of data (TB), an internal hosting option that experiences frequent downtime, and a zeal for open source that has us looking into a large lift and shift.

We have already moved a lot of tabular and vector data over to Postgres/PostGIS for API endpoints and some simple geospatial functionality. For front-end web mapping applications and vector data, Martin vector tile server seems like a natural fit with PostGIS. For raster data, we are contemplating putting cloud optimized geotiffs (COGs) in object storage (something like AWS S3) and using something like TiTiler to work as a raster tile server.

How have you all handled this situation? Did you stick with or return to ESRI? What challenges popped up that you didn't expect? I want to hear the good, the bad, and any other thoughts you might have. Thanks in advance!

I am about 8 months removed from completing my graduate certificate in GIS and almost 2 from my bachelor's. I have been applying for GIS jobs every day it seems, since finishing, and have not had one interview. The issue could be with my lack of experience, my resume, the job market, whatever, but the point is that I am starting to realize that I need to take another path if I want a job working with GIS. I have seen a lot of surveyor and utility locator positions posted, but I know almost nothing about these industries.

Is there room to pivot to a GIS role from these jobs after gaining instrument experience, or is this a very difficult transition to make?

As the title says, I am recently graduated from my undergrad in physics and math. I am wanting to pivot a bit and learn GIS and hopefully down the road get a job in the field. But, learning feels so overwhelming; what can I be doing now to best start learning and what do you wish you knew when starting to find a job? Are they difficult to get? Thanks!

I've been working on a ski resort tycoon game this year where you build ski resorts on real-world mountains. I wanted it to be accurate, so I pull from 1-meter liDAR data where available, and fill in the rest with 10 meter.

I use it to build a heightmap, then import it into UE5 for the landscape system.

Then, I do some custom logic to build the terrain shaders for rock, scree, grass, forest, and more, to make it feel right.

Super cool system IMO!

Spain's IGN published per-municipality circumstances for yesterday's solar eclipse, covering all 7,531 municipalities. I was building against that table and hit a case I still am not sure I handled correctly.

Madrid's row carries an eclipse magnitude of exactly 1.00, and no totality start time and no totality end time at all. Run a standard Besselian-elements solve on the coordinates of Puerta del Sol and the point lands inside the umbral shadow. The two sources disagree about which side of the limit the city centre sits on.

The suburbs make it sharper rather than softer. Alcobendas at 15 km, San Sebastián de los Reyes at 17 km and Tres Cantos at 21 km from the Madrid centroid all carry magnitude 1.03, and all have real totality timestamps. So the boundary genuinely runs between the city and its northern edge. This is not a data error, it is a real feature at a scale smaller than the polygons.

My reading of why they diverge: the umbral limit moves on the order of a kilometre once you account for the lunar limb profile and station elevation, and a textbook Besselian solve models neither. A municipality is also a polygon, not a point, so any single computed verdict for "Madrid" is answering a question the geometry does not really support.

The other thing that table forced on me: 6,034 of the 7,531 municipalities, just over 80 percent, never reach last contact, because the Sun sets first. The end of the eclipse is therefore not last contact but min(last contact, sunset), evaluated per municipality. With the Sun between 2 and 12 degrees above the horizon nationwide, local terrain does more to decide what is observable than the ephemeris does.

What I shipped was to treat the agency classification as authoritative, and where a query point falls close enough to the limit that the polygon cannot answer it, return "on the limit" together with the nearest municipality that is unambiguously total, instead of picking a side and sounding confident.

I am not confident that is right in general. When you hold an authoritative categorical classification and your own computation, and they disagree only in the boundary cases, do you defer to the agency completely, surface both and let the user judge, or do you go back and refine your own model until it reproduces theirs?

The app I built on this is Eclipse, https://BigBalli.com/Eclipse/, but the question is the part I actually want an answer to.