Welcome to Geospatial Futures!
I have no background in programming or computer science. When I was 14 I made an Angelfire website with some incedibly basic HTML. More recently I attempted to learn Lua in order to code some music scripts. I still haven't created a music script. Nor do I have a background in data analysis. I do have a university education in sociocultural anthropology, sociology, and philosophy, but quantitative data formed no part of my path.
Yet here I am, some guy in my late 30s running head first into GIS analysis, diving into Python, itching to develop JavaScript knowledge, and dreaming of machine/deep learning. What business have I with such outlandish behaviour? Why would I head down this road?
The reason is that for the first time in a long time, a road has actually seemed exciting. I started this adventure after a vague notion of a career change, veering away from call centres, retail, and e-commerce, and towards conservation and science. I saw an opportunity to reskill.
As I began this journey, I realised the things that I was drawn to the most are conservation, science, and philosophy. There are threads between these things that lead back to myself as a child: being excited by science and being convinced I was going to be a scientist before I told myself I couldn't; taking walks with my dad and sister through our local national park, being enamoured by the flora and fauna therein.
Coming back to the present, I'm discovering a new air of excitement as I head down this road. It's not going to be smooth. I have a lot to learn, and I will make a thousand mistakes before I become competent, but I'm not an idiot. I'm already proving to myself that I'm capable.
So what of this blog? I wanted to start writing about a range of things surrounding conservation, coding, conservation, land management, cartography, philosophy, among other things - all punctuated with examples of GIS, Python code snippets, etc. I will also be constructing and conducting projects involving fieldwork and geospatial data, which I imagine will/have found a home in my repositories. If you want to follow along, or just want to take a look at some of the things I'm doing, please feel free.