[solardev]

Have you ever considered GIS (mapping, geo datasets, cartography, drones, photogrammetry, etc.?)

I thought it was an interesting niche that on the user side (governments, researchers, environmental consultancies, etc.) tend to focus around one big company (ESRI), but on the web side, you have things like Felt.com, Mapbox, etc., and on the app side, Gaia, Handlebars, Trailforks, Alltrails, RidewithGPS, Strava, etc.

Personally I'm drawn to it because of the intersection of software and real-world data, but I've never worked in it full time – just studied it a bit in college and did some side projects.

Fun stuff though.

[cancan]

Hi there! I’m the founder of felt.com. Obviously, I am biased but I do work in this industry for the reasons you mentioned. It’s a great intersection of challenging technology, real-world impact and pure fun. Also, I’d say the GIS world is changing so fast right now; the modern GIS stack will look a whole lot different in a few years than it did.

[solardev]

Hi cancan,

Thanks for making that! I really like your service, especially after years of griping at ArcMap. I couldn't believe how archaic and buggy and unpolished their software felt, and I'm so glad to see new players trying to make things easier to use.

I try to describe Felt as the Google Docs of maps, and I've used it to plan several road trips for friends and family. It's really cool to see you add more GIS and data import features too. It's great stuff! Thank you :)

Disclaimer: I also tried to apply for a job at Felt once, but didn't pass the technical interview (a frontend animation challenge which I had no experience with). No hard feelings, but if you have any tips about any particular skills that would be worth developing to get better in this space, I'm all ears, and would love to try again in the future :)

Regardless, I appreciate the product you've built. It's always cool to see web apps being pushed forward in fun and useful ways, ESPECIALLY when they try to disrupt old desktop monstrosities.

[babyent]

Can you please explain the last part of your comment? I’m curious I have zero insight into gis

[supergoogler]

I would like add my experience to this, a month ago I pick metabase as the default data visualization tool for the company I work for, we have to do pin map for some data to visualize but we are behind firewall, internet access is not allowed and is not on the options. we come up with offline map, we downloaded osm mbtiles files and we use tile server to serve the tiles. like others mentioned the whole process was really fun and rewarding. I have touched many stacks and used many software to do the work. Motivated by that I am also implementing a complete offline map of large selected area with satellite images and 3d view. If anyone interested happy to help.

[elric]

I worked on a GIS project only once in my career, but it was a lot of fun. Learning about different map projections, coordinate systems, WGS84, etc was pretty interesting. Tooling wise we started off with MySQL but migrated to PosrgreSQL with PostGIS for far superior GIS support.