Yesterday I gave a talk at Geomob London on my adventures in vibe coding. The slides are pretty but probably don’t tell the whole story unless you have been reading my regular posts on my projects.

The images in the slides are all cartoons of an old dog learning new tricks and got some praise, the way I made them was interesting, so i thought I would post about it.

I started out by building an empty slide deck on Google Slides, each slide had a title and a few had a handful of words, they all had spaces for an image. I asked Claude:

When Ed challenged me to make a map of Geomob Events on a podcast, I jumped in scraped the data and produced quite a nice map despite fighting a battle with Gemini to extract the data for the map from the markdown files of the Geomob website. The problem, as Ed pointed out retrospectively was that the events map was going to be difficult to maintain as further events got scheduled, it was very much a snapshot at a point in time and my suggestion that someone could edit the json file of events was not very practical.

20 years of 52°North! What a brilliant opportunity to reflect a little. Time to look back in time? Nah, Albert Remke, co-founder of 52°North, already did this successfully in his blog post 52°North – 20 Years of Exploring Horizons. So, shall we take a look ahead instead? Honestly, with the constant changes brought on by AI, predicting the next year is anyone’s guess. How about reflecting a bit on what we do right now?

At 52°North, we design and develop open-source software and infrastructure solutions with a geospatial background. Clear enough? No? Yeah, we get it, it sounds pretty abstract and generic. So how can we describe our services more specifically and showcase the ambitions we share with our partners from research and beyond? In other words:

What are the key challenges 52°North aims to address,

Dear Reader,

We are back from FOSS4G 2026 in Hiroshima, Japan, and we want to share what we presented and what we brought home. With up to 14 parallel tracks, this year's global edition was dense: two days of workshops, three days of talks, and plenty of conversations at the booth.

GeoSolutions attended with one representative per product line: Andrea Aime for GeoServer, Lorenzo Natali for MapStore and Stefano Bovio for GeoNode. Together they delivered 5 workshops and 14 presentations, and GeoSolutions supported the event as a sponsor, continuing our long-standing commitment to the OSGeo community and to open geospatial standards.

I’ve been testing Codeberg for over a year now, with Trajectools being the largest repo that has already moved its headquarters from Github to Codeberg.

I have been very happy with the experience so far and – at the same time – I couldn’t help but notice the further decline of Github performance.

Therefore, in the upcoming weeks, I am planning to move the remaining MovingPandas repos. For anyone who wants to contribute, this means that:

5 months ago, I laid down the plans for what was going to happen going forward with my various open source projects. But after that post, it has been nothing but ... silence! If you were to look at my GitHub contribution graph, there was also a noticeable drop-off there too.

So what happened?

Number sixteen was my peak volume week. My biggest training week in three years (not counting the Bear races of 2023 and 2025).

• 17 hours, 27 minutes all training

• 52.2 miles hiking and running

• 14,938 ft D+ hiking and running

I went out on steep mountain trails five times to prepare for the big initial climb, high altitude, and big finishing descent of Run Rabbit Run (RRR). I did more power hiking than running on the climbs, and worked on descending with fast feet and momentum. I'm not planning to use poles at RRR, so I left them behind all week.

Tuesday I hiked and ran up the Round Mountain trail in the Big Thompson Canyon. 3,000 feet of climbing in less than five miles is a good simulation of the climb up Steamboat Mountain. There is some very pretty scenery on the trail, too.

Week eight began in Glacier National Park and week eleven finished in Steamboat Springs.

• 51 hours, 47 minutes all training

• 116 miles running and hiking

• 16,903 ft D+ running and hiking

Hiking with my oldest kid in Glacier and Grand Teton Nation Parks was one of the highlights of this year. Arabelle has become a strong hiker (summiting nine of Colorado's fourteeners this summer) and is great company on the trail. Hiking options were limited in Glacier, which was recovering from torrential rain and washed out trails, but the Tetons were wide open to exploring. Our big hike was to trendy Delta Lake below Teton Glacier.

A sprawling four-story wooden lodge on the edge of a greenish lake with big peaks in the background. Glacier National Park, Montana, U.S.A.

I recently posted about the build of my “A Pint Near Me” app. When I had finished the build I asked Claude “Can you give me a few interesting stats from the pubs data?”

• The most 5 common names?
• How many single name pubs (ie not repeated)?
• Any regional patterns in naming?
• Anything else?

Pause for a minute and see if you can guess the answers, maybe have a play with the map to test your guesses before you scroll down.

These answers were all generated by Claude based on the prompt above.

A while after I blogged about my Pub Density Map it got picked up by Hacker News and the map got a big spike in views. Some of the comments were complaints that a pub was missing or that the pubs data was not searchable, some were less helpful. I had used the Open Pubs data from GetTheData, which in hindsight, was maybe not the best choice, the data was quite rough and a bit out of date but it seemed fit for my purpose of illustrating the areas of the country with highest pub density (pubs per 10k population), I had included the pub points just because I had them and that had attracted the most criticism.

The next version of QField is here. While this time of the year is a well-deserved holiday period for many, we’ve dedicated ourselves to improving the stability and refining of your favorite field mapping tool.

We’re calling this effort the “summer of stability”, a sprint we will undertake on a yearly basis. But there are plenty of improvements to cover, so let’s go over them.

First, we’ve introduced a new bookmark manager to make QField’s experience around spatial bookmarking feel more complete. With the manager accessible via the dashboard’s main menu – users will be able to browse their bookmarks as a full list with the ability to quickly jump to a bookmark’s location by tapping its name, as well as edit its properties.

The latest release is available at Github. For discussions on the release here. To see all issues & pull requests closed by this release see the Git closed milestone for 4.0.2 on GitHub. Summary of changes by function pgr_dijkstraVia Fix: … Continued

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Hello pgRouting community,

The pgRouting Team is pleased to announce the release of pgRouting version 4.0.2

The latest release is available at [1]. For discussions on the release, go to [2]. To see all issues & pull requests closed by this release see the Git closed milestone for 4.0.2 on Github. [3]

## Summary of changes by function

Ian has been a member of our community from the very beginning, as an original voting member who gathered in Chicago in February 2006 to establish OSGeo. He also is a co-founder of GeoTools, the Java library that is the … Continued

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We are honoured to announce that Ian Turton is the recipient of the
2026 Sol Katz Award (the 22nd year of the award), at the recent FOSS4G
event in Hiroshima, Japan.

A lot of the posts that we share on Mappery come via our social feeds at Mastodon and Bluesky as either an @ message or a hashtag #MapsintheWild. Up till now our workflow to turn the social posts into blog posts on Mappery was something like this:

This might be a long post, it was a pretty challenging project.

I wrote last week about my Amazing Animals in Crisis map of 50 endangered species, I got some bad news on Friday that my usage of the IUCN polygon data was in breach of their licencing conditions and a request that I take the map down, which I promptly did. This was a big disappointment as I was just about to expand the map to almost 400 species and now I had no data.

Learning – even if data is apparently free and open, carefully read the license conditions before you use it. Obvious, I know, but I had to learn the hard way.

If you have ever spun up a PostGIS database or deployed GeoServer in a container, there is a good chance you pulled an image built by Kartoza. As of mid-2026, our geospatial Docker images have been pulled over 21 million times on Docker Hub. That number quietly astonishes even us. We are a small team based in Cape Town and Stellenbosch, yet our containers sit in CI pipelines, university labs, government servers, and humanitarian deployments on every continent.

Oslandia will be attending the 2026 QGIS User Conference, which is taking place this year 5-6 October in Laax, Switzerland

Workshop QGIS Expressions: From Labels to Geometry Generators (by Benoit de Mezzo | Monday, October 5, 11:30 AM)
Deploying QGIS in large IT systems – best practices (by Vincent Picavet | Monday, October 5, 2:30 PM)
Mental health and OpenSource, tough topic for engineers (by Vincent Picavet | Monday, October 5, 4:00 PM)
From Users to Contributors: Rethinking Participation in QGIS (by Jean Felder | Monday, October 5, 4:30 PM)

The QGIS User Conference is an annual event that brings together users and developers of the QGIS open-source geographic information system (GIS). The conference offers an opportunity to discover the latest developments in QGIS, share real-world experiences, and network with the global QGIS community across administrations, industry, academia, and beyond.

I was requested to take down this map by the IUCN team (International Union for the Conserfvation of Nature) because my usage breached their license terms.

TorchGeo 0.10 is the largest release in TorchGeo history, with a record 220 PRs from a record 29 contributors over the last 6 months. It includes full time series support, fiscal sponsorship, and security hardening, among many other exciting new features!

The last two years have seen a dedicated effort to add full time series support to TorchGeo. As of this release, TorchGeo contains dozens of time series benchmark datasets:

TorchGeo 0.9 includes 13 new datasets and a number of improvements required for better time series support, encompassing 3 months of hard work by 15 contributors from around the world. We are now trying to make more frequent releases to get exciting new features out to users as quickly as possible!

TorchGeo was the first library to provide pre-trained geospatial foundation models, and offers more GeoFMs than all other GeoML libraries combined [1]. Users have always had the ability to generate their own embeddings using TorchGeo. However, using FMs requires considerable expertise and compute, preventing widespread adoption.

We’ve overhauled the project creation flow in QFieldCloud to make getting your field data campaigns off the ground faster than ever. Along with a clean new web interface, we are introducing two highly requested features to boost your team’s productivity: more advanced project creation, with native XLSForm imports and 1-click project cloning! 🚀

When creating a new project, you can now define the initial extent field right away. You can also configure a basemap using OSM or a custom XYZ layer. What is more, you can set whether you prefer to keep the original color, or convert the basemap into dark or light themes.

We are also thrilled to introduce a completely new way to generate projects: XLSForm support.

Mappery has been my side project for 8 years, for the last 5 or 6 years Arnaud Ferrand has been my co-editor and the tech brain that keeps the site running. Mappery is a large WordPress site with 2,500 posts and 3,500 images of Maps in the Wild (pictures of maps in the street, on clothes, furniture, alcohol etc).

For several years we had a map plugin that allowed us to enter a coordinate pair for a post and to render a clustered map with pins representing each post, click on a pin and the post image and some text appears in the popup with a link to the post. It worked ok but the map used the Google Maps API which had cost implications and we also had several complications with the map not rendering and the plugin wasn’t being maintained.

The new MovingPandas release 0.23 has just landed in pypi and conda-forge and I want to share with you two highlights:

The new HTML representations for Trajectory & TrajectoryCollection objects aim to make interactive data exploration in notebooks more convenient by providing commonly required descriptive data summaries and data previews in a structured way.

Before 0.23

New in 0.23

For reports, presentations, and websites, I regularly need maps: a raster layer, contextual boundaries, a legend, and maybe a logo. Nothing requiring an elaborate page layout. And I often need more than one. For the COMBINED project, for example, I map the same study area in Rotterdam over and over. The extent, the boundaries, and the logo stay put; only the raster and its legend change. Exactly the kind of repetition worth automating.

A Inteligência Artificial já está transformando a maneira como profissionais GIS analisam dados, automatizam processos e desenvolvem soluções geoespaciais.

Neste curso, você aprenderá a aplicar IA generativa, agentes inteligentes e automação em ferramentas como QGIS, PostGIS, GeoServer e GeoNode, por meio de cases, exercícios práticos e problemas inspirados em projetos reais.

Você verá como utilizar IA para gerar e revisar consultas SQL espaciais, detectar inconsistências, corrigir geometrias, automatizar publicações no GeoServer, criar estilos SLD, produzir metadados, analisar dados no QGIS e desenvolver fluxos geoespaciais mais inteligentes.

https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/osgeo-joins-new-geocommons-fund/

Largest European investment to date into open geo tooling

The European Commission is making a strategic investment of 6 million Euro into an ambitious new programme to support free and open source software in the geospatial domain.

The new GeoCommons programme will be handing out grants directly to researchers and developers working on geospatial commons.

For many years now, we have been enjoying the basemap.at service with it’s various basemap options (color, gray, with/without labels, …) in WMTS and vector tiles.

For a few weeks now, there is an additional service by BEV: Their cartographic models “Kartographischen Modelle (KM)” are now available as raster (KM-R) in COG-TIFF format.

Prezado leitor,

Neste post irei apresentar como instalar o GeoServer 3 juntamente com o PostgreSQL 18/PostGIS utilizando Docker em um servidor executando Ubuntu Linux 26.04.

Ao final deste tutorial você terá um ambiente pronto para desenvolvimento, testes ou treinamentos, contendo:

• PostgreSQL 18 + PostGIS 3.6
• GeoServer 3.0.0
• Nginx como proxy reverso
• Estrutura organizada para persistência dos dados
• Instalação totalmente baseada em containers Docker

Pré-requisitos:

• Ubuntu 26.04
• Acesso sudo
• Conexão com Internet
• Pelo menos 4 GB RAM (8 GB recomendado)

Sem enrolação, vamos aos passos:

1. Atualizar o Ubuntu

Antes de instalar qualquer software é recomendável atualizar os repositórios e aplicar as últimas atualizações do sistema operacional.

If you have ever tried styling a vector map in Maputnik, you have probably hit this wall: you have a folder full of perfectly designed SVG icons, but there is no simple “Upload SVG” button for your symbol layers.

Unlike desktop GIS software, web mapping specifications (like MapLibre and Mapbox GL) are optimised for rendering speed. Loading hundreds of individual SVG files requires too many HTTP requests and bogs down performance. Instead, the style specification requires a sprite sheet : a single raster image (PNG) containing all your icons, paired with an index file (JSON) that tells the map exactly where each icon sits on that image.

El Inside the Lab CITIUS ha cumplido 10 años y hemos vuelto a asistir para vivirlo de cerca. El Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxias Intelixentes (CITIUS) es un centro tecnológico de la USC (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela), ha celebrado una nueva edición de su jornada de puertas abiertas para enseñar los demostradores de los proyectos que desarrollan en sus instalaciones. Es un día para, directamente, venirse arriba con la ciencia que se hace aquí al lado.

Este año la cita era todavía más especial por alcanzar esa cifra redonda de una década de divulgación y tecnología.

Tras recorrer gvSIG Desktop en los siete primeros vídeos del curso y desplegar el geoportal en gvSIG Online en el vídeo 8, llega el turno de gvSIG Mapps, la pieza móvil de la Suite. Es la aplicación pensada para llevar el geoportal al terreno: el técnico municipal sale a campo con tableta o móvil, consulta las mismas capas publicadas en Online y, si tiene permisos, edita los datos desde la propia posición sin pasos intermedios de vuelta al servidor.

Con el vídeo anterior cerramos el bloque dedicado a gvSIG Desktop. En este octavo damos el salto a la segunda pieza de la Suite: gvSIG Online, la plataforma web sobre la que se montan los geoportales municipales. Donde en Desktop el proyecto se quedaba en el equipo y la salida final era estática (un PDF, un plano impreso), con Online ese mismo trabajo se publica en internet y queda disponible para que cualquier técnico o ciudadano lo consulte desde el navegador.

It’s been a couple of busy weeks, with the QGIS 4.2 release and meetings and conferences all over the place before a few, hopefully quieter, weeks of summer break.

The Austrian QGIS user group met online on 25 June to exchange experiences with different webmapping solutions, ranging from QGIS+Lizmap to QGIS Cloud.

Para organizaciones científicas como el Instituto de Ciencias del Mar (ICM), la alineación con los estándares internacionales no es solo una cuestión técnica, sino una necesidad estratégica para que sus investigaciones tengan un impacto real.

El uso de estándares permite que los datos dejen de ser archivos estáticos y aislados para convertirse en «datos vivos», capaces de integrarse en redes globales y ser utilizados por la comunidad científica internacional. Los principales marcos utilizados en este proyecto son:

Hasta ahora hemos trabajado dentro del documento Vista: cargar capas, simbolizarlas, consultarlas, editarlas. En este séptimo vídeo damos el paso al documento Mapa, que es el componedor cartográfico de gvSIG Desktop, donde montamos una salida lista para imprimir o exportar a PDF, con su rótulo, su leyenda, su escala, su norte y su logotipo institucional.

Partimos del proyecto electoral que ya usamos en los vídeos 3 y 5 (mesas electorales, ejes de carreteras y distritos electorales). Antes de pasar al Mapa, dejamos la Vista preparada como queremos que aparezca impresa: aplicamos una simbología por valores únicos sobre los distritos y configuramos un etiquetado por el campo districte, ajustando fuente, tamaño y color.

La soberanía digital europea se ha convertido en una de las grandes cuestiones estratégicas de nuestro tiempo. Ya no se trata únicamente de disponer de tecnología, sino de decidir qué tecnología usamos, bajo qué condiciones, con qué garantías y con qué capacidad real de control sobre nuestros datos, infraestructuras y servicios críticos.

Hasta ahora hemos cargado capas que ya existían (locales o publicadas como servicio). En este sexto vídeo damos el paso de crear y editar nuestra propia cartografía dentro de gvSIG Desktop, recorriendo los tres tipos básicos de geometría: puntos, líneas y polígonos. Es el flujo más habitual cuando un ayuntamiento necesita crear información propia o completar la que ya tiene.

Partimos del WMTS de imágenes Sentinel y ortofotos PNOA del IGN (el mismo que usamos en el vídeo 4), hacemos zoom sobre Cullera y añadimos también el shapefile ‘camins_cullera’ como capa de apoyo, repasando de paso cómo personalizar su simbología.

We are preparing version v4.0.0 of the QGIS Plugins Website (https://plugins.qgis.org), a planned milestone release scheduled for 13 July 2026. Below is a summary of what is coming and how it may affect plugin developers, so you can review ahead of time.

This will be our first major release that adopts a proper announcement and release schedule. It will include major improvements and changes related to the security checks and plugins auto-approval; and a new feature for Qt6 compatibility check which was funded by Oslandia (oslandia.com) and developed by @florentfougeres.

After I published my map of defence spending a friend suggested that it would be interesting to see how things had changed since the end of the Cold War in 1990/91.

I knew that the data I had covered a longer time period so I asked Claude if we could update the map and it checked the data and confirmed that there was reasonable data coverage back to the mid 70’s so I decided to backdate (or is it update?) the map to run from 1975 to 2024.

The extended map now runs from 1975 to 2024, covering periods that include the final years of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the post-9/11 surge in Western defence spending, and the sharp remilitarisation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The first half of summer has flown by. I'm quickly catching up on six busy weeks here.

• 53 hours, 52 minutes all training

• 130.1 miles running and hiking

• 16,220 feet D+ running and hiking

That's about 9 hours of exercise, 22 miles of running and hiking, and 2,700 feet D+ per week. I've been active enough to maintain my base fitness, but haven't done much building. Travel and vacation have kept me from sticking to a regular workout schedule.

In week two, I participated in Laramie's Pilot Hill Classic 25K race for the first time. I experienced cramps again, but not as bad as at Quad Rock. I tripped a few times on the way down, and once did a full Superman dive, head-first, onto a smooth (luckily) stretch of trail. I had some calf cramps and a bloody elbow after that, but the cramps cleared up before the finish.

Green plains and hills under a partly cloudy sky at dawn.

With Keir Starmer recently losing a Defence Secretary and then leaving a budgetary timebomb for his successor as PM, Andy Burnham, I thought it might be interesting to see how we rank on defence spending and who are the world’s largest exporters and importers of arms.

I started out by trying to find some data on arm sales and Claude sent me to SIPRI where you can download very granular data on almost every transaction but after playing with the data I decided to take a simpler approach and map expenditure as a % of GDP (which is what Trump and the NATO powers have been arguing about) and exports and imports of major arms.

Después de ver cómo conectar servicios remotos, en este quinto vídeo entramos en el Administrador de complementos, la herramienta que permite ampliar la suite con paquetes adicionales: nuevos formatos de datos, librerías de símbolos, geoprocesos, conectores a servicios remotos, etc.

En los vídeos anteriores trabajamos con datos en local (shapefiles, ortofotos descargadas). En este cuarto vídeo nos conectamos a servicios cartográficos publicados en internet por organismos oficiales, sin necesidad de descargar nada: los estándares OGC WMS y WMTS. Para un ayuntamiento esto se traduce en poder usar como fondo o como capa de consulta la cartografía del PNOA, del Catastro o del IGN, siempre actualizada y mantenida por su productor.

Nuestra QGISesCamp2026 se ha celebrado felizmente en Madrid el pasado sábado 13 de junio de 2026. El evento, con su carácter presencial como espacio de encuentro, intercambio de conocimiento, experiencias y proyectos ha conseguido una vez más el fortalecimiento de la comunidad QGIS en España. Este año ha contado con la participación de más de sesenta personas (un 28% de mujeres): cincuenta y ocho provenientes de diversos lugares como Salamanca, Granada, Córdoba, Santander, Barcelona, Murcia, Valencia, Málaga o Pamplona, además de Madrid, y tres personas asistiendo de manera remota.

En el vídeo anterior cargamos capas y trabajamos su representación visual. En este tercero vamos a lo que hay “detrás” de la geometría: la tabla de atributos. Cualquier capa en un SIG lleva asociada una tabla con los datos descriptivos de cada elemento, y aprender a moverse con soltura entre mapa y tabla es uno de los hábitos más útiles del trabajo diario.

Partimos de un proyecto con tres capas centradas en un caso muy habitual en la gestión municipal, la organización electoral: mesas electorales (puntos), ejes de carreteras (líneas) y distritos electorales (polígonos). De paso nos sirve para repasar los tres tipos de geometría con los que vamos a trabajar a lo largo del curso. Sobre los distritos aplicamos una simbología por valores únicos, esta vez clasificando por un campo de la propia tabla.

I’d like to introduce gitRmap: a semi-automated map of locations that you can add your own points to. It’s designed for people who are new to GIS, but who know a little bit of Git.

You can create a map like the one below, with your own pins on it, just by following the quick start at nickbearman.com/gitRmap.

If you get stuck, I want to know! Message me, email me or open an issue on GitHub.

I wanted to create a tool that made it easier for more people to make maps. There are plenty of tools out there for creating a web map, but for someone new to GIS they can be pretty intimidating.

Después de la entrega introductoria, en este segundo vídeo damos el salto a la parte práctica con gvSIG Desktop. Es la primera sesión aplicada del curso y empieza por el principio: dónde descargar gvSIG Desktop (la versión portable 2.7.0 para Windows o Linux) desde la web de SCOLAB, cómo realizar la configuración inicial básica del programa (idioma, sistema de referencia por defecto, unidades de mapa) y cómo se organiza la aplicación a partir del Gestor de proyecto y sus tipos de documentos: Vistas, Tablas, Mapas e Informes.

Con este primer vídeo arrancamos el curso de manejo básico de la Suite gvSIG (Desktop, Online y Mapps) aplicado a la gestión municipal. Se trata de una entrega introductoria, dedicada a situar el contexto antes de entrar en la parte práctica de las próximas sesiones.

La información geográfica empieza a transformar una administración cuando deja de estar encerrada en documentos, mapas estáticos o sistemas aislados. La Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales de Uruguay es un gran ejemplo de ello. En el último año ha seguido ampliando su ecosistema de visualizadores temáticos, llevando la información geográfica oficial a ámbitos tan diversos como la justicia, la administración departamental, el deporte o la autoridad electoral.

En los últimos meses se han incorporado nuevos visualizadores en ámbitos tan diversos como: