The feed of updates to Spatially Adjusted by James Fee
People sometimes ask how I got into programming. They usually expect some heroic story about learning C in a dark lab, or building kernels for fun, or some other origin myth programmers like to tell themselves. Nope. It was HyperCard . If you’ve never seen it, you should watch this. Seriously. HyperCard was this strange, wonderful thing Apple shipped in the late 80s that let you build software out…
Every few days someone sends me a new demo. AI generates a house. AI designs a backyard. AI produces a digital twin from a handful of photos. The video is always beautiful. A slow flythrough. Perfect lighting. A slider that moves from “ before” to “ after” as if complexity has finally surrendered. What are we doing? Then comes the question: “ Isn’t this what you’re building?” No. What they’re…
“ Cloud-native” didn’t fail. It just stopped mid-sentence, stared confidently at the audience, and waited for applause. Cloud-native storage . Cloud-native compute . Cloud-native pricing . Cloud-native marketing decks . Coming back strong And then—nothing. No cloud-native operations. No cloud-native governance. No cloud-native workflows. No cloud-native accountability. But sure, let’s declare…
Every modern GIS platform claims to support self-service . Self-service analytics. Self-service data access. Self-service publishing. What they usually mean is: “ You are now responsible for everything we didn’t productize.” What Self-Service Is Supposed to Mean In theory, self-service GIS promises: Less friction Faster insight Fewer gatekeepers More autonomy for users This idea didn’t originate…
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. That alone makes it worth reading. I’ve known Bill long enough to recognize when he’s not trying to coin a term, but instead trying to surface a discomfort. This post sits squarely in that space. “ Post-GIS” has always been a…
Failure is not an edge case. At scale, systems fail constantly: dependencies time out partial work succeeds retries collide state drifts networks lie The real problem isn’t that things break. It’s that most systems pretend failure is exceptional — and act surprised when it happens. That pretense is where humans sneak back in. Where humans appear Across this series, humans show up in the same…
Observability is usually described as an engineering concern. Logs. Metrics. Traces. Dashboards that only a few people know how to read. At small scale, that framing mostly works. At large scale, it quietly fails. Because the moment a user asks “ Did it run?” or “ What happened?” , observability has escaped the engine room and landed squarely in the product. The moment humans reappear When systems…
Humans have been glue for as long as technology has existed Every modern system has APIs. And yet somehow, at scale, work still moves through screenshots, Slack messages, copied IDs, “ just rerun it,” and people who remember what happened last Tuesday . This isn’t because APIs are bad. It’s because APIs don’t integrate systems. They expose capability , not intent . APIs are necessary — and…
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. When something broke, a person noticed. When data didn’t line up, a person fixed it. When a workflow wasn’t documented, a person remembered how it worked last time. Because that person existed, the system…
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. This is almost never true. And when it is true, it’s usually long after the problem has already moved on. Standards don’t fail because they’re poorly designed. They fail because, over time, we stop being honest about what they are and…
For a long time, we told ourselves a comforting lie: “ It’s just a file.” The file lived in a folder. The folder lived on a server. The name of the file basically told you what it was. And if it didn’t, you could always ask the person who created it. Which, of course, worked great — right up until it didn’t. COG and STAC didn’t emerge because the geospatial community suddenly discovered better…
Fixing problems For a long time, I believed scale caused problems. Latency spikes. Weird edge cases. Workflows that worked perfectly fine yesterday suddenly melting down under load. Data inconsistencies that only showed up once customers started doing things “ wrong” — which is to say, doing things like actual humans. I don’t believe that anymore. Scale doesn’t break systems. Scale reveals the…
Confused?!?!?! At some point, almost every GIS team hears the same complaint: “ GIS makes everything more complicated.” This is usually said right after a map exposes something inconvenient, like the fact that two systems describing the same thing don’t agree on where it is, what it’s called, or who owns it. Naturally, the map is blamed. GIS didn’t make things complicated. It just showed up with…
For a long time, I treated workflow orchestration as plumbing. Important plumbing, sure, but still plumbing. Something you install, test once, and then politely forget about while you move on to the “ real” problems. As long as data showed up where it was supposed to and nobody was paging you at 2 a.m., the orchestration layer could stay safely out of sight, like pipes in the wall. This worldview…
Metadata is one of those things everyone agrees is important—right up until the moment it slows something down. At small scale, metadata feels optional. Nice to have. Something you’ll clean up later if there’s time. When you’re moving fast and shipping results, it’s easy to treat metadata as documentation rather than infrastructure. Scale has a way of exposing how wrong that framing is. The…
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.” The map rendered. The analysis ran. The coordinates were fine. The problem is usually everything wrapped around it. GIS just happens to be where organizational issues finally become visible. When people say “ the GIS is wrong,” what they…
For a long time, I believed interoperability in spatial systems was mostly a file format problem. That belief is understandable. File formats are tangible. You can point to them. You can argue about them. You can put them in requirements documents and architecture diagrams. If two systems can read the same format, surely they can work together. At small scale, that assumption holds just well…
One of the things working at Trimble has reinforced for me—over and over again—is that scale changes everything . And I don’t just mean big data in the abstract sense. I mean scale across: data volume data diversity organizational boundaries disciplines ( GIS , CAD , BIM ) and, most importantly, human workflows It’s easy to talk about spatial technology in isolation. It’s much harder—and far more…
I noticed earlier last week that I just missed the 25th anniversary of the mission of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission aboard STS-99 . I’m not sure there has been a more important elevation data product that has been released to the public than SRTM . Given the uncertainty of funding for government programs in the new Trump administration, I’m not sure we’ll see another public 3D dataset in my…
This week is one of the best in baseball—the start of Spring Training, with players practice already underway. Sadly, it’s been a long time since the Giants last made a World Series run, and the Dodgers are as annoying as ever. But hey, the team is healthy, and baseball is always fun to watch!
UPDATE : We have the domain working, you now just need to go to geofeeds.me and you’ll get the same results as below. The feed is at geofeeds.me/feed . You don’t need to update anything as the old urls will continue to work. Full speed ahead, make sure you reach out to Bill or myself if you want your blog, newsletter or other writing added. A couple days ago, Bill Dollins reached out to me and had…
One of the best parts of my iPhone 15 Pro is that it has a USB-C port on it. While I appreciate the lightning port, I have just grown so tired of having to manage so many different ports while traveling. Coupled with my iPad having USB-C and my Apple Watch having a USB-C charging cable, I went ahead and got myself an Anker 3 port USB-C charger (which has a USB-A for those times you need one)…
IMG_0054 GIS and Topo maps go hand in hand. From the classic Quad maps , to the National Geographic TOPO ! product , to just basic Esri Topo map services , these topographic maps have been part of GIS since the beginning. Google Maps has had their “ terrain” layer for a long time (though it seems to be fading out for some reason). Apple with the release of Watch OS 10 and the Ultra 2 added…
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’ve had an eBay search going for years in hope that someone will give them up. I suspect every binder set that still exists will never be given up. It’s like owning a Picasso, you’d never sell it and ask your relatives to bury…
I mean we’ve been saying it since Elon had bought Twitter, but the deed is done . The social network formerly known as Twitter has officially adopted X.com for all its core systems. That means typing twitter.com in your browser will now redirect to Elon Musk’s favored domain I was talking to a good friend over email last month and he had this to say: The fun days of early twitter and before that…
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 implementations. The big deal is how can you implement, how does one actually create a digital twin and deploy it to your users. Let’s be honest though, the…
My son decided to change majors from biodesign to GIS . I had a short moment when I almost told him not to bring all this on himself but then thought differently. I could use my years of experience to help him get the perfect degree in GIS and get a great job and still do what he wants. ASU Seal He’s one semester into the program so he really hasn’t taken too many classes. There has been the…
If there is one constant in my GIS career, it is my interest in the monitor I’m using. Since the days of being happy for a “ flat screen” Trinitron monitor to now with curved flat screens, so much has changed. My first GIS Analyst position probably had the worst monitor in the history of monitors. I can’t recall the name but it had a refresh rate that was probably comparable what was seen in the…
Hey SOTM is going on, didn’t even know. The last SOTM I went to was in 2013 which was a blast. But I have to be honest, not only did this slip my mind, none of my feeds highlighted it to me. Not only that, apparently Esri is having a conference soon. (wait for me to go ask Google when it is) OK , they are having it next week . I used to be the person who went to as much as I could, either through…
Someone asked me why I hadn’t commented on Cesium and Unreal getting together . Honestly , no reason. This is big news honestly. HERE , where I work, is teaming up with Unity to bring the Unity SDK and the HERE SDK to automotive applications. I talk about how we used Mapbox Unity SDK at Cityzenith (though I have no clue if they still are). Google and Esri have them too. In fact both Unreal and…
So my last post was very positive . I figured out how to relate the teams that share a stadium with the stadium itself. This was important because I wanted to eliminate the redundant points that were on top of each other. For those who don’t recall, I have an example in this gist : Now I mentioned that there were issues displaying this in GIS applications and was promptly told I was doing this…