Hacks For Geography Weekly

The Actual State of Hacks For Geography Weekly

I started reading Hacks For Geography Weekly about three years ago when someone in a GIS Slack channel recommended it. At the time it was a side project from a cartographer who posted irregularly. Now it's a semi-regular dispatch that mostly covers data wrangling for map makers, coordinate reference system nightmares, and the occasional review of open-source tools that nobody else is talking about. The format is straightforward. Each issue runs roughly 1,200 to 1,800 words, breaks into two or three sections, and ends with a link dump that's actually curated instead of a generic GitHub trending page. The writer is careful to flag when something is opinion versus tested workflow. That matters more than you'd think.

How I Use Hacks For Geography Weekly

My workflow is simple: I subscribe to the RSS feed, skim the subject line, and only open issues where the headline mentions something I'm actively working on. The issues about vector tile optimization and PostGIS geometry simplification saved me roughly four hours last month alone when I was dealing with a 2.3 gigabyte shapefile that QGIS kept choking on. I applied the exact preprocessing steps they described — reprojecting to a local CRS first, running Dissolve with buffer tolerance set to zero, then exporting to GeoPackage — and the file dropped to under 400 megabytes. Worked on the first try. There's a download link at the bottom of every issue for a standalone PDF version if you want to annotate it offline or pass it to someone who doesn't read email. The author also maintains a Notion page with archived issues sorted by topic, which I find useful when I need to look back at something from two years ago.

What Actually Works And What Doesn't

The hack sections are the main draw, but they're not universally useful. Some of the earlier issues covered tricks that have since been baked into modern QGIS or ArcGIS Pro releases. The one about using GRASS v.clean in a batch script to snap nodes within a tolerance is still relevant because nobody at ESRI added a dedicated snapper UI element, but the part about manually editing .prj files to fix broken CRS definitions has been dead since QGIS 3.16 handled those gracefully. Here's a less obvious thing most people miss about Hacks For Geography Weekly: the real value isn't in the step-by-step tutorials. It's in the edge-case notes buried in the margins. When the writer mentions that rasters over 10 gigabytes tend to cause SLD rendering failures in GeoServer under Windows, that's the kind of detail you won't find in any official documentation. It took me six months of fighting map caches before I figured out that the issue was specifically tied to Windows file handle limits and not GeoServer itself. Another example that saved me a lot of time. The weekly noted that using MVT vector tiles with a custom simplification threshold above 5 meters creates visible jitter when users zoom quickly between levels. I was seeing this in a project for a transportation department and couldn't figure out why the linework would shudder during smooth zoom interactions. The fix was dropping the simplification to 2 meters and enabling the maxBytes parameter properly in the tile source config. They mentioned it in passing within a larger post about performance tuning, not as a standalone solution.

Known Gaps And Where It Falls Short

Hacks For Geography Weekly has real limitations. The coverage skews heavily toward open-source toolchains. If you're working primarily in ArcGIS Pro with custom Python add-ins, you'll find the content relevant but not directly applicable half the time. The author has mentioned wanting to broaden scope but hasn't got there yet after three years. Another gap: the issue frequency has dropped. When it was twice weekly, it was easy to catch up. Now it's irregular — sometimes weekly, sometimes a gap of three weeks between issues. The backlog on the Notion archive is substantial and the older content sometimes references software versions that are no longer current. You have to read carefully and check dates. The biggest structural problem is that several of the technical hacks assume you already have a working Python environment with GDAL, Shapely, and Fiona installed. For someone starting fresh, the prerequisite knowledge gap is real. I'd recommend pairing it with the ArcObjects or QGIS developer cookbook depending on your platform if you're not already comfortable with command-line geoprocessing.

Getting The Most Out Of It

Don't read each issue cover to cover. The issue structure typically puts the heaviest technical content in the second section, after a lighter intro. Skim the first part, go straight to the hack section, and only read the link dump if you have time. The link dump is useful but dense — it usually contains eight to twelve links and you'll spend more time filtering than extracting value if you treat it seriously. I keep a personal spreadsheet tracking which issues contained actionable content for my current projects. It's crude but effective. After a few months you start noticing patterns in what the writer covers and what they skip, and you can target your reading more efficiently. Topics that consistently appear include coordinate transformations, vector tile pipelines, style sheets for map rendering, and database performance for spatial queries. Topics that almost never appear include remote sensing workflows, drone data processing, and cartographic design theory. If you're new to this stuff, start with the issues tagged beginner in the archive. They exist but there aren't many of them. The writer seems uncomfortable labeling anything beginner-friendly because the actual implementation steps assume familiarity with command-line tools and basic GIS concepts. That's honest, but it means the onboarding curve is steeper than the tag suggests.