[professor_x]

Im just someone interested in geospatial. Im a regular SWE. Seems like <1% of SWE jobs have even a nominal geospatial element like putting pins on a map.

Any tips in general? Not just for breaking in but what you wish you knew

[stevage]

That's an extremely general question. But mostly my take is: geospatial is not that hard. There are a lot of dinosaurs out there and legacy GIS companies who want you to believe that GIS is special and requires all kinds of specialist knowledge. But for most applications, you can just treat it as, data that happens to also have latitudes and longitudes. And then, it really is just points, lines and polygons the vast majority of the time.

Once you have specific goals about what you're trying to do with data, and how to visualise it etc, then there are usually straightforward solutions to achieving them. The difficulty can sometimes be describing them, or forming the right conceptual model.

It's worth getting really familiar with the GeoJSON spec, and using that as your data structure wherever possible.