March 6, 2023

22 - Spatial Data Book Coming Later this Year

Welcome to another edition! I’m Daniel Imfeld, and here I share things I’ve read recently, updates on what I’ve been working on, and occasionally nascent blog post drafts.

I’ve been busy with family recently, so this issue is going to be yet another “summary of stuff I’m working on.” Next week should have some real opinions and thoughts about things.

Writing and Work

The third article in my spatial data series is out. This one covers different types of regions used when working with geographic data. It also touches on topics such as

• Why does mapping data use fields like admin1, admin2 and what do they actually represent?
• What is a ZIP code actually?
• What kinds of non-official regions are useful for analyzing spatial data?

Beyond that, my Svelte MapLibre library has reached a mostly feature-complete place. There’s still a lot of work left to do on the documentation side of things, but if you try it out, let me know how you like it!

Spatial Data Book

All this geographic data work has been leading up to a book or two that I’m planning to publish. The pending title for the first one is “Introduction to Geographic Data for Developers.” This will incorporate information from the posts I’ve written so far, and also cover topics such as using libraries like PostGIS and turf to actually analyze and modify the data.

I’m still figuring out the exact table of contents, but it’s looking something like this:

1. What is Spatial Data and Why is it Important?
2. Introduction to GeoJSON
3. Converting and Loading Data
4. Coordinate Systems and Projections
5. Working with Spatial Data in PostGIS
6. Working with Spatial Data in Javascript
7. Visualizing Data with D3
8. Visualizing Data with MapLibre
9. Next Steps

Watch this space for content previews and probably some free cheatsheets as well. And of course, I’d love to hear what challenges you’ve encountered working in this field.

Links and Reading

Culture Viruses are ideas that hook into a company’s culture and make it sick. There are all things that seem obvious, but creep in to businesses so often that it’s worth being reminded. Quick read and worth your time.

This Twitter thread by Geoffrey Litt is a timely overview of styles of reactive programming. If you follow the Twitter frontend community at all you’ve probably seen a lot of opinions about signals, and whether they’re good or too complicated or already actually implicitly used in certain systems. Geoffrey’s thread is a nice step back from all the boring hot takes which looks at actual research into the field.

My boring hot take is that I’ve been using Svelte for years and Svelte stores + reactivity already gets you the nice parts of signals without the supposed bad DX that others complain about :)

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