What I'm Thinking

Over the winter my girlfriend and I got a place together, and I wanted to create a nice map to put up on our wall. I decided to make a project out of it. Since I started learning about GIS in 2011 I had only read the odd news article or experimented once or twice with QGIS, a free and open source GIS suite. For school and work I had exclusively used ArcMap, so trying out and getting used to the many differences in QGIS was a lot of fun. ... Read More

As I’ve written about before my current blog is a static site generated with Hugo. Being a static site, with no dependencies it is incredibly easy to set up a method to deploy your site using git push. An in-depth article on this workflow was published by DigitalOcean and is what my method has evolved from over the past few months. I recently installed Gogs, or “Go Git Service”, which is a lightweight, self hosted GitHub clone that I will be using to host my personal projects that I don’t want to share with you fine people. ... Read More

Docker is a popular cross-platform containerization software package. It essentially allows developers to package up their app with all the necessary dependencies and enable it to work on many different platforms without any further configuration. I use Docker to run a few things on my server, including PostGIS and MySQL database instances, a Wordpress container to host my girlfriend’s food blog, and a container for the Redis key-value store that my interactive web GIS application uses to push data to clients via websockets. ... Read More

Web GIS today is growing at an exponential pace. Organizations like Google, OSM, MapBox, CartoDB, and of course Esri are providing free and gorgeous basemap tiles that can be used in the browser, as well as inside of desktop GIS applications. A concequence of using these tiles is that you will usually not be able to perfectly replicate their look and feel when adding your own data on top of these basemaps. ... Read More

I have contributed my personal website theme, called hugo-geo, to the offical Hugo Themes Index! Hugo is a fast, portable static site generator written in Go, and writing this theme is my first official venture into front-end web work. The theme aims to be fully responsive, and designed for post and tutorial sections. Example Site Demo View the Getting Started Tutorial After I released the theme I realized that having other sites created using the same colour scheme as my website could possibly be misleading, so I have since re-themed my website using the Flat-UI scheme published on Adobe Color CC. ... Read More