Spatial Stack with Matt Forrest

Join me at ELIS 2026 - elisevent.com - Use the code Matt15 for 15% off! See you in Canada!

A viral LinkedIn post called "Something Big Is Happening" by Matt Schumer has been making the rounds and for good reason.
In this episode, I break down why the pace of AI development should have every GIS professional paying attention, what I'm seeing in the geospatial space right now (from Claude Code in ArcGIS to AI-specific job postings), and the four things you should be doing right now to future-proof your career. Whether you're mid-career or fresh out of school, this one's for you.
Original Article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/something-big-happening-matt-shumer-so5he
00:00 — The Article That Went Viral
00:40 — AI Coding Tools Are Changing Everything
01:51 — What I'm Seeing in Geospatial Right Now
02:30 — Step 1: Understand the Landscape
02:49 — Step 2: Start Learning the Tools
03:18 — Step 3: Architect Projects, Don't Just Prompt
04:09 — Step 4: Broaden Your Skill Set
04:43 — Advice for Recent Grads and Early-Career Pros
05:51 — Will AI Actually Wipe Out GIS Jobs?
06:42 — Wrap Up
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📊 FREE: The Modern GIS Skill Map
The 5 skills that actually matter in modern GIS (and what you can stop learning). Based on a survey of 1,400+ geospatial professionals.
➡ Get the free training + PDF guide: https://forrest.nyc/go/training/
📰 Daily modern GIS insights: https://forrest.nyc
CONNECT WITH ME
📸 Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/matt_forrest/
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbforr/
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🌐 Website: https://forrest.nyc

Join me at ELIS 2026 - elisevent.com - Use the code Matt15 for 15% off! See you in Canada!

Join me at ELIS 2026 - elisevent.com - Use the code Matt15 for 15% off! See you in Canada!

If you are still trying to run your entire geospatial workflow on a local desktop, you are fighting a losing battle. The "Modern GIS Stack" looks chaotic at first glance with dozens of logos, cloud formats, and new databases. But once you strip away the noise, there are actually only a few key layers you need to master to make it all work.
🚀 Don't navigate this shift alone. Join the Spatial Lab: https://forrest.nyc/spatial-lab/
In this video, I break down the architecture that is replacing the traditional GIS model. We move beyond Shapefiles and Geodatabases into the world of Cloud-Native Geospatial, showing you exactly how Storage, Compute, and Analytics have separated—and how you can use them to scale your career.
📰 Daily modern GIS insights: https://forrest.nyc
00:00 - The Modern GIS Chaos
00:34 - The Shift to Cloud-Native Formats
01:14 - Why Storage Buckets Replaced Hard Drives
02:07 - Essential Formats: GeoParquet, COGs & Zarr
03:57 - Adding Intelligence: STAC & Iceberg Catalogs
06:07 - Transformation & Orchestration (GDAL, dbt, Airflow)
08:30 - The 3 Engines of Modern GIS
08:48 - Engine 1: The Processing Layer (Sedona, Wherobots)
11:19 - Engine 2: The Transactional Layer (PostGIS)
12:38 - Engine 3: The Analytical Layer (BigQuery, Snowflake, DuckDB)
14:54 - Mapping Modern Layers to Traditional GIS
16:29 - The Application Layer: Analytics & BI
17:35 - Connecting QGIS & Python to the Cloud
18:30 - Modern Web Maps (Felt, Mapbox, DeckGL)
20:24 - Conclusion: You Don't Need to Learn Everything
CONNECT WITH ME
📸 Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/matt_forrest/
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbforr/
📧 Newsletter: https://forrest.nyc
🌐 Website: https://forrest.nyc

Join me at ELIS 2026 - elisevent.com - Use the code Matt15 for 15% off! See you in Canada!

Join me at ELIS 2026 - elisevent.com - Use the code Matt15 for 15% off! See you in Canada!

Have you ever stopped to think about how GPS completely changed the world simply by becoming an invisible infrastructure running in the background of our everyday apps?
According to Pierrick Poulenas, the CEO and co-founder of Picterra, the exact same pattern is playing out right now with Earth Observation and GeoAI.In this episode, we sit down with Pierrick to explore how GeoAI is bridging the gap between raw satellite imagery and accessible business intelligence. We dive into how Picterra is removing the friction of complex remote sensing data, allowing non-technical users to train machine learning models and turn planetary pixels into actionable insights.
We also discuss the massive real-world impact this has on global supply chains and monitoring regenerative agriculture at scale. Plus, Pierrick shares his vision for a collaborative future in the space industry and teases an exciting new free tool for sustainability innovation.
Connect with Pierrick and Picterra:
https://picterra.ai/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/picterra/
Key Takeaways:
- Why Earth Observation is following the "GPS Playbook" to reach mass adoption.
- The shift from just collecting raw satellite data to creating usable applications at scale.
- How human-in-the-loop design builds trust and accuracy in AI models.
- Real-world use cases in spatial finance, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), and regenerative agriculture.
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🚀 Join The Spatial Lab:
Stop guessing at your career path. Get direct mentorship, advanced training, and a roadmap to these high-value roles inside The Spatial Lab.
👉 https://forrest.nyc/spatial-lab/
📰 Daily modern GIS insights: https://forrest.nyc
CONNECT WITH ME
📸 Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/matt_forrest/
🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mbforrgis
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbforr/
📧 Newsletter: https://forrest.nyc
🌐 Website: https://forrest.nyc

Join me at ELIS 2026 - elisevent.com - Use the code Matt15 for 15% off! See you in Canada!

Join me at ELIS 2026 - elisevent.com - Use the code Matt15 for 15% off! See you in Canada!

In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Kyle Walker, Professor of Geography at TCU and the creator of popular R packages like tigris and tidycensus.
Kyle dives into why he views US Census data as critical infrastructure and how open data is fundamentally transforming decision-making across industries like real estate and energy. He shares the origin story of his open-source work, explaining why he champions the R programming language for full-stack geospatial analysis. The conversation also covers the evolution of web mapping, from the laborious process of rendering dot-density maps to the blazing-fast performance of modern tools like PMTiles.
Finally, Kyle reveals how generative AI specifically Claude Code and the Zed editor is serving as his ultimate coding assistant, allowing him to rapidly build complex projects like the mapgl package and turn his ideas into reality faster than ever.
Connect with Kyle:
X/Twitter: https://x.com/kyle_e_walker
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/walkerke/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/kylewalker.bsky.social
00:01:00 – Welcome and Kyle Walker’s Background at TCU
00:06:18 – Why US Open Data is Critical Infrastructure
00:09:20 – Demystifying Census Data with tigris and tidycensus
00:15:48 – Applied Spatial Data: Real Estate and Forecasting Models
00:18:28 – The Evolution of High-Resolution Dot Density Maps
00:23:48 – The Human Element: How People React to Seeing Data Maps
00:29:14 – R vs. Python: Why R is a Geospatial Powerhouse
00:37:44 – Accelerating Development: Using Claude and AI for Coding
00:43:40 – The Future of Mapping: PMTiles, Segment Anything, and LLMs
00:48:18 – Where to Find Kyle’s Book, Tools, and Workshops
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🚀 Join The Spatial Lab:
Stop guessing at your career path. Get direct mentorship, advanced training, and a roadmap to these high-value roles inside The Spatial Lab.
👉 https://forrest.nyc/spatial-lab/
📰 Daily modern GIS insights: https://forrest.nyc
CONNECT WITH ME
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/matt_forrest/
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbforr/
📧 Newsletter: https://forrest.nyc
🌐 Website: https://forrest.nyc

Join me at ELIS 2026 - elisevent.com - Use the code Matt15 for 15% off! See you in Canada!

Join me at ELIS 2026 - elisevent.com - Use the code Matt15 for 15% off! See you in Canada!

We have never had more data about our planet: petabytes of satellite imagery, aerial photos, and sensor readings collected daily. Yet, turning that massive volume of "noise" into a clear signal remains the fundamental challenge of the geospatial industry.
In this episode of the Spatial Stack, I sit down with the engineering and product minds from Wherobots: Ryan, Phil, and Len - to tear down the architecture required to handle Earth Observation data at a planetary scale. We move beyond the buzzwords to discuss the engineering "war stories" of building resilient inference pipelines.
We dive deep into why the industry is moving away from simple computer vision toward "Large Earth Models" that function like LLMs for the physical world. We also get into the weeds of the tech stack: the battle between Dask and Ray for distributed compute, why Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs) aren't always the answer for inference, and how formats like Zarr are unlocking multidimensional analysis.
In this episode, we cover:
The Data Bottleneck: Why "garbage in, garbage out" is still the biggest hurdle in monitoring a changing planet.
Infrastructure Realities: The specific limitations of Google Earth Engine and why we needed a cloud-agnostic approach.
Engineering Pivot: Why Wherobots migrated from Dask to Ray to solve "crashing cluster" syndromes and memory management issues.
The Future of GeoAI: How embeddings and foundation models are compressing petabytes of data into searchable, semantic insights.
✅ Sign Up for Wherobots: https://wherobots.com/
✅ Learn more about Apache Sedona: https://wherobots.com/apache-sedona/
✅ Learn more about RasterFlow: https://wherobots.com/blog/rasterflow-earth-observation-inference-engine/
✅ Sign Up for the RasterFlow Private Preview: https://wherobots.com/rasterflow-preview/
00:00 – Teaser: The "Garbage In, Garbage Out" problem in GeoAI
00:01:51 – Introductions & Icebreakers (The controversial ice cream opinions)
00:03:08 – The Challenge: Monitoring a changing Earth at scale
00:10:30 – Data Engineering: The hidden complexity of NAIP, clouds, and tiling artifacts
00:14:19 – Modeling Reality: Why Computer Vision models fail on geospatial data
00:21:51 – The Google Earth Engine Debate: Walled gardens vs. bringing compute to the data
00:27:53 – Introducing Rasterflow: A new architecture for scalable inference
00:36:51 – The Engineering Story: Why we switched from Dask to Ray
00:43:40 – File Formats: Why Zarr is superior to COGs for multidimensional inference
00:47:40 – Workflow Walkthrough: Running the "Fields of the World" model
00:51:40 – Embeddings, Foundation Models, and Large Earth Models
00:57:40 – How to get started with Rasterflow
📰 Modern GIS insights: https://forrest.nyc
CONNECT WITH ME
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/matt_forrest/
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbforr/
🌐 Website: https://forrest.nyc

Join me at ELIS 2026 - elisevent.com - Use the code Matt15 for 15% off! See you in Canada!