Spatially Adjusted by James Fee

People sometimes ask how I got into programming.

Every few days someone sends me a new demo.

“Cloud-native” didn’t fail.

Every modern GIS platform claims to support self-service.

I read Bill Dollins’ recent post, Post-GIS Revisited, and found myself nodding along — not because it neatly resolves the “post-GIS” question, but because it refuses to.

Failure is not an edge case.

Observability is usually described as an engineering concern.

Humans have been glue for as long as technology has existed Every modern system has APIs.

Ignore the person behind the curtain For most of my career, GIS has “worked” not because the systems were resilient, but because very smart, very patient people were standing just out of frame.

Abandoned data falling back into nature There’s a comforting myth we like to tell ourselves in technology: If only everyone followed the standard, things would work.

For a long time, we told ourselves a comforting lie: “It’s just a file.”

Fixing problems For a long time, I believed scale caused problems.

Confused?!?!?!

For a long time, I treated workflow orchestration as plumbing.

Metadata is one of those things everyone agrees is important—right up until the moment it slows something down.

After a few decades working around GIS, I’ve come to a fairly reliable conclusion: when something goes wrong, it’s almost never because the GIS “didn’t work.”

For a long time, I believed interoperability in spatial systems was mostly a file format problem.

One of the things working at Trimble has reinforced for me—over and over again—is that scale changes everything.

I noticed earlier last week that I just missed the 25th anniversary of the mission of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission aboard STS-99.

This week is one of the best in baseball—the start of Spring Training, with players practice already underway.

UPDATE: We have the domain working, you now just need to go to geofeeds.me and you’ll get the same results as below.

One of the best parts of my iPhone 15 Pro is that it has a USB-C port on it.

IMG_0054 GIS and Topo maps go hand in hand.

4A6FB86A-A903-4E07-AF1F-F9503A91189D If there is one regret in my life, it is that I didn’t steal the ARC/INFO manual binders from one of the jobs I used to use ARC/INFO.

I mean we’ve been saying it since Elon had bought Twitter, but the deed is done.

Finished reading: Hands-On Azure Digital Twins: A practical guide to building distributed IoT solutions by Alexander Meijers I’ve been working with Digital Twins for almost 10 years and as simple as the concept is, ontologies get in the way of implementat…

My son decided to change majors from biodesign to GIS.

If there is one constant in my GIS career, it is my interest in the monitor I’m using.

Hey SOTM is going on, didn’t even know.

Someone asked me why I hadn’t commented on Cesium and Unreal getting together.

So my last post was very positive.