2025-10-27 – Weekly GIS News : Remote roles are increasing!

Last week, the forum buzzed with discussions on remote work opportunities and how they’re reshaping the GIS job landscape. There was also a strong focus on career development, with members exchanging advice on upskilling, particularly in cloud-native GIS and environmental impact projects. Additionally, debates over technology choices for fieldwork and data accuracy sparked lively exchanges, showcasing the community’s commitment to both innovation and precision.


This Week’s Hot Topics

Remote roles on the rise—explore now!
Members are diving into the increasing availability of remote GIS positions and the impact this trend has on career flexibility.
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Would You Take This Job? GIS Application Architect
A thought-provoking discussion about the responsibilities and challenges of a GIS Application Architect role.
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Where to upskill for cloud-native GIS dev
Explore the best resources and strategies to enhance your skills in cloud-native GIS development.
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Which came first: UE or shortest path
A technical debate delving into the origins and practical applications of utility engineering versus the shortest path algorithms.
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Would You Take This Job? GIS Analyst
Community members weigh in on the pros and cons of a specific GIS Analyst position.
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Upskilling for environmental impact GIS
Discussions focus on how to effectively gain skills for GIS roles in environmental projects.
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Basemap convenience vs accuracy at 1:10,000
A nuanced look at the trade-offs between ease of use and precision in basemaps.
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QField vs Survey123 for offline community data
Comparing two popular tools for gathering community data offline, with insights into their strengths and weaknesses.
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FAQ/Guidelines
A handy resource for newcomers and seasoned members alike.
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Admin Guide: Getting Started
Essential reading for anyone managing the community.
Read more here


Thanks for catching up with us this week. Feel free to join any of the discussions or start your own topic in the forum. Until next time, take care and stay curious.

Switched to a fully remote GIS role last year and moving our basemaps/rasters to COGs indexed by STAC on S3 made field syncs way faster — VPN treating a 1 GB GeoTIFF like a postcard wasn’t helping. If you’re upskilling, start with STAC + COG; this page is a good jump-off: https://stacspec.org. Small caveat: keep an offline fallback like MBTiles on tablets for dead zones.

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Quick tip: serving vector basemaps as a single PMTiles file on R2 (works in MapLibre; GitHub - protomaps/PMTiles: Pyramids of map tiles in a single file on static storage) cut our remote field sync times a lot. We still ship a small MBTiles offline pack for dead zones — my hotspot isn’t a magic wand — and if you try GeoParquet for analysis, keep row groups sensible or queries lag.

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On the ‘cloud-native’ side, moving our vector data to GeoParquet and querying it with DuckDB over S3 (https://duckdb.org) made remote reviews a breeze — felt like swapping a cargo ship for a backpack. Caveat: configure the S3 region and keep Parquet statistics enabled so pruning works, otherwise you pay in egress and wait time.

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And dropping a tiny TiTiler (TiTiler) in front of our COGs and caching through CloudFront made remote map reviews snappy in QGIS and the browser. Building on @scawhit, just watch CORS and Cache-Control/ETag or you’ll chase stale tiles.

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