Esri / ArcGIS Platform Engineering
I learned early that Esri behaves best when you refuse to treat it as a desktop tool. ArcGIS
Enterprise and ArcGIS Pro, arcpy Python automation, Workflow Manager, Experience
Builder, geoprocessing/GP services, and Arcade — my rule is that ArcGIS gets no special
exemptions. It goes under version control, automation, and documentation like every other
production system I run.
Geocoding & Location Data Quality
No geocoder is right everywhere, which is why I stopped trusting any single one. I once put
five geocoders head-to-head against the same address set to work out which
blend a platform should actually rely on. Address deduplication, parcel data, and the
unglamorous quality plumbing that determines whether a pin lands on the right building or the
one next door — that plumbing is where I spend my time.
Geospatial Data Architecture
The schema underneath the map decides what the product can ever become, so that’s where I
start every design. GeoJSON and Parquet layouts, KML/KMZ ingestion pipelines, and
PostgreSQL/PostGIS-style modeling for lines, polygons, markers, layers, features, and tracks
— built so the storage still holds up after the feature counts get serious.
Map-Driven Web & Mobile Products
A field tool has to hold up through a full workday, not a demo. Before committing a platform
to a base map, I settled the Mapbox vs Google Maps question with actual pricing
math instead of preference — and I designed offline mode after accepting a hard truth:
field crews lose signal exactly where the work happens.
Geospatial Processing at Scale
I’ve pushed satellite imagery-derived data through Databricks and Spark,
kicked the tires on Apache Sedona, Shapely, and Rasterio myself rather than reading the docs and
guessing, and compared commercial sources like Ecopia and Precisely. The lesson that stuck: once
the geometry outgrows one machine, you’re building a pipeline, not a map.
GIS Security & Governance
A latitude and longitude can be somebody’s home or a client’s critical asset, so I
treat location data as sensitive by default. I wrote the persona/permission authorization matrix
for an Esri Workflow Manager layer myself and put GIS APIs behind WAF and API management —
the map platform has to clear the same security review I hold everything else to.
