Journal

A lot has happened since my last post. The stress of launching a product is nerve wracking to put it mildly. Working 80 hour weeks became the norm - between finding partners, marketing and working on the product on top of my actual job, 7 days in a week didn't seem enough.
But that's a post for another time - today's post is a short tutorial on setting up a GIS server for webmapping.

Webmaps as a service like Mapbox and ArcGIS Online offer an easy way for companies to delve into GIS with minimal investment. However there may be privacy concerns, high cost/low speed with large datasets and limitations beyond simple displays ...

I was very fortunate to have access to the ESRI GIS stack including ArcGIS Info, ArcSDE and ARC/INFO during my time at SKM. However these costs are very hard to justify in a lean startup environment, especially when GIS is not the main purpose of the startup. This is where open source software comes in.
In this article, I will go through how to set up a comparable GIS environment using open source software. Specifically:

• Setting up a spatial database with PostgreSQL/PostGIS
• Importing OpenStreetMap data
• Setting up desktop GIS with QGIS

We'll be using PostgreSQL 9.4, PostGIS 2.2 and QGIS 2.12 in this article, although the setup is largely the same for different versions. ...