I took a real Shapefile with almost 1.1 million polygons and converted it to GeoParquet three different ways. The file went from over 1.4 GB of source data down to 246 MB, opened cleanly in QGIS, and ran spatial queries in seconds instead of minutes. The dataset was the New York City building footprints. Every […]
I copied a shapefile path into a chat box and asked Claude to build a map. A few seconds later, QGIS opened a new project, loaded a Seattle bus network, zoomed to the extent, and reported the feature count back to me. I never touched the QGIS interface. That is what AI in QGIS looks […]
I lost most of an afternoon once to a column of addresses that would not standardize. Some had “ST” where I wanted “Street,” some wanted “Saint,” and a few coordinates were cut off at the wrong digit. I wrote a regex from scratch, then rewrote it twice. The work was tedious, the kind that drains […]
Most geospatial tools were not built with spatial as a core feature. Spatial got bolted on later, and you can feel it the moment you try to run a real query. I ran the same four spatial queries across PostGIS, DuckDB, and a newer single node engine called SedonaDB. One of them did a spatial […]
A GIS analyst and a spatial analyst can read like the same job. The descriptions overlap, the tools overlap, the maps look the same. They are not the same role. One is a technician role focused on creating and managing spatial data. The other is a diagnostic role focused on finding patterns and answering core […]
