Howdy - GIS person

[thief1434]

How's it going everyone. I'm a college senior in a geography/GIS program so I have some decent experience in making not just 'cartographically sound' maps, but also some more complex, data-driven maps such as raster calculation and block group analysis. I absolutely love what I do, and love making maps. Right now I'm trying to focus on programming bc it's interesting and also bc of job prospects (considering masters in CS). Mmmmm, I exercise a lot, so I've been thinking of traveling to some more remote parks and running/biking the paths there and tracking the route w/GPS to maybe make some cool maps of the parks, but that might be put on hold 'till corona is over.

Cheers!

[Redrobes]

You should be well adept at using a GPS and extracting the traces from that and then try out editing the OpenStreetMap using them. Thats a lot of fun. I did some of the nature reserves around my local area since they were not terribly well done and google cant drive into them nor did they have any backpack enabled street view stuff. Also, since they were enhancing the reserves, it keeps on changing with new areas and shacks, information panels and hides being built so it was never up to date. Putting all of the right in OpenStreetMap meant that at least there was one map source where it was correct and usable.

If you into programming then getting the data back out of OpenStreetMap in XML form is a good way to play with it. You can then run through the file plotting the roads and areas into your own map with your own style. I did mine in Perl because I know it a bit and perl has excellent XML libraries. But Python and most other text handling languages would be ok.

If you go over to our community mapping projects then we use slippy maps and they are done with Leaflet.js which is also cool to play around with. If you want something really cool and fun to try out then get a local web page running some slippy maps using Leaflet.js and write some code to make up the tile sets for it. For job prospects thats a cool idea and I have done a few of them for clients over the years.