Bill Dollins

Twenty Years, Part One

In 1993, at the very start of my career, I was a newly minted AML developer working on a data automation project. A good bit of the industry’s energy at the time was focused on digitizing vast amounts of geospatial information that still existed in analog form, including mylar, paper maps, and other physical artifacts, so it could be brought into GIS and made useful.

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/03/19/twenty-years-part-one/

One advantage of your grandchildren living with you is that there is no shortage of random hugs.

"Field of Dreams" hits a little harder after your father has passed away.

I’m sure there plenty of reasons to be unhappy with Anthropic, but I’ll allow myself to be happy with them today.

As an inveterate early riser who’s been working mostly alone for the past three years, I’m having to get back in touch with “scheduled send.”

I’m happy with how they turned out.

@AtanasE@mastodon.social Perhaps. Interestingly, I’ve encountered two company blogs that run Wordpress and seem to have intentionally disabled RSS.

General trend I’m seeing via GeoFeeds is that company blogs increasingly do not have RSS feeds, whereas independent/personal blogs do. It’s not universally true but seems to be trending that way.

The most important geospatial app you will see today: https://www.whereisitfiveoclock.beer

@AtanasE@mastodon.social @rjhale1971@fosstodon.org

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did my vertices get out of order?”

Rainy Sunday kitchen time with my wife.

The circadian rhythm that wakes me up at 0400 is a drag sometimes.

How OOP Helped Me Understand AI Agents

I first encountered the term "agent" more than 20 years ago, when I was working on an agent-based modeling system for simulating infrastructure inter-dependencies. Imagine an agent representing a power plant that has gone offline and an agent representing a telecommunications end office switching itself to battery backup and tracking how many simulation cycles the batteries will last. We called them "intelligent agents" but they…

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/02/11/how-oop-helped-me-understand-ai-agents/

Ten years ago, I wrote about the geospatial landscape as I saw it then. Ten years later, I decided to take another look.

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/01/28/post-gis-revisited/

GeoFeeds: Now with MCP

It's been about a year since we rolled out GeoFeeds, a spatial new aggregator along the lines of the old Planet Geospatial. During that time, it's been humming along, and we've added about 90 blog feeds to it. It provides a single, rolling, aggregated feed of posts from those blogs over the previous year. I've been impressed by the surge is RSS feeds over that time. If you have a blog or feed related to geospatial, personal or corporate, you can…

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/01/20/geofeeds-now-with-mcp/

Spatial Analysis with Claude Code

I've been doing more (a lot more) with Claude Code lately. With its subagents and skills features, it's become more customizable and powerful. I can really dial it into doing things the way I want them done, which accelerates my development and quickly gets me to where I am focused on important behaviors, rather than rote scaffolding. I recently wanted to trying expanding beyond code generation to analytic tasks, so I set about…

https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/01/14/spatial-analysis-with-claude-code/

The star has come down. 2025 is in the books.

Claude Code doesn't seem to be a better programmer than me. It seems to make the same kind of mistakes I would. It simply finds them faster after the fact.

Hacked up a quick desktop geoparquet viewer with Claude Code. Currently browsing data from the HIFLD archive on Source Collective.

I used Claude Code to build an app to help me with social media. I had it build a version with Electron and another with MAUI. Makes me wonder how many SaaS subscriptions I can sunset by building helper apps for myself this way.

The past year has been difficult for many reasons, but today, I watched my granddaughters experience Christmas with joy and safety. So many choices and challenges were vindicated today.