There and Back Again

Hello everyone! I'm now about halfway through the GIS certificate program. For this first week, our task was to create an ArcGIS StoryMap showing off places we'd lived. If we had already had Cartography with this professor, she gave us the option of updating our previous StoryMap, which I have done here: GIS 4048 updated StoryMap I've seen a lot of you in other classes at this point. Hello to everyone who sees this! Honestly, I joined this program kind of impulsively. I've always liked maps and spatial data, but have never really studied this formally. My employer had an opportunity to send several of us to a GIS conference, and I volunteered to go mostly out of curiosity. I was feeling bored and stuck with my career, and while I was there I had a eureka! moment, and signed up for this program on the next start date. As we're drawing close to the end of the program, I'm excited to begin a GIS career. I've arranged for an internship with my employe...

This was a challenging lab for me. I started this course as a total newbie to Python, and feel like I've gotten to a point where I have pulled off some challenging tasks in this 6 week course. Here we had to take a shapefile of rivers in Hawaii, and use a search cursor with for loops to extract 6 features: object ID, X and Y coordinate data, Name, geometry object, and a vertex ID that we generated, and print them to a text file and our console. Here is the flowchart for this process: The first steps are to import the relevant modules, set the environment,and turn on overwriting. There are apparently two ways to handle setting up the text file, either creating it beforehand with write mode turned on, or allowing the program to create it. I created it beforehand. I encountered a problem initially because I didn't have the name exactly matching in my code, which I think may have been a non-issue if I'd allowed Python to create it. Then we created a search cursor to e...

This has been a challenging week for me. This week is all about exploring and manipulating data in ArcGIS with Python. We learned about using the describe function for various reasons, notably to clean up filenames when copying to a new gdb. We used search cursors coupled with a for statement to glean select data from a large attributes table, to populate a dictionary, and used scripts to define our workspace and output environment, and to create a new geodatabase. The biggest challenges I had this week were creating a search cursor that worked on multiple attributes, using SQL to select a particular attribute from a range. Nothing worked at first, and I struggled on setting definitions correctly and on correct syntax. I also struggled with the code to populate an empty dictionary using the search cursor. I utilized our textbook, ESRI documentation, our class forum, YouTube videos, and code review with AI. This has been a crash course in coding. It's only 6 weeks long, and ...

This was another fun lab. Coding has been a giant challenge for me, but I've been able to make it through every week so far, and I'm learning a lot. This week, we learned to use Model Builder to create complex actions. We took two shapefiles, of a basin and soils, and used the builder to clip the soils to the basin, select unsuitable farmland from the attributes table of the clip output, then erase it from that output to produce a new shapefile: We then used the Python notebook in ArcGIS to create a program that would take a point shapefile of hospital locations, and add XY coordinates to it, create a dissolved 1000m buffer around them, and print status messages about the process. The final output looked like this: In this lab, I leaned heavily on the ESRI documentation for code examples. I also discovered that when using a geoprocessing analysis tool, in lieu of running it you can copy the Python code the tool uses into the notebook, which helped me develop code...

This lab was all about debugging script. We got to practice debugging code in two exercises, and in the third we had a chance to get buggy code to run without fixing it by using a try/except statement. This is still challenging to me as a novice programmer, and some of the code samples we're being provided aren't readily intelligible to me. But this is very good practice for learning how code works without a walkthrough, and requires us to do research and revisit the assigned texts. Specific difficulties I encountered were specific indentation syntax errors - Python is very particular about indentation, and tabbing vs. spacing. I had also tried to run my Python script inside an ArcGIS aprx that was referenced by the code, which led to most of the code executing but not allowing the program to save as scripted, because the program was in use. The errors that were left for us were relatively straightforward, but took a fair amount of effort on my part. Using the try-except...