How I got interested in GIS 🗺

I have no formal GIS training, as things were still pretty primitive back when I was in college in the early 2000s especially when it came to web services, online data and open source software. Computers where a lot less powerful back then. I remember vaguely hearing a bit about Remote Sensing when I was involved in the Environmental Science Club in college, but it wasn’t something I ever used. 

I picked up QGIS in 2010, as I was looking for a way to make my own topographic maps, as I wasn’t happy with what you could get on the Internet. I learned I could FOIL the primative campsite shapefile from the DEC and get data from there to help find campsites. I was pretty good at map and compass stuff from  my years in Boy Scouts. Over time, I’ve branched out into other GIS areas. I’m always been very interested in land use but also demographics.

More recently I’ve been doing more automation of processes, using Python and R statistical language to do some map plotting and a lot of Census data gathering and processing. I like working with R it’s fast and easy to implement code in. I’ve also lately been doing a lot more with Leaflet and web services more generally. 

I don’t do anything professionally with maps, it’s just a hobby.