I have a pal who does GIS work in the oil and gas industry- I think its crazy how much influence ESRI has on that market. Would love to learn more about interaction with map data like this.

For a non-gis person this was a fun read. So thanks for the post!

I have the same sentiment on ESRI. It’s basically all I got taught in my university courses, but it’s not what I ever want to use.

It’s crazy that a privately held company holds like a third of the market share.

And personally, I don’t think their software is that good. I find their documentation to be undesirable and their solutions to be strict.

Case in point, the geodatabase (gdb) standard is purposefully meant to obfuscate the data within. No one has ever been able to explain to me why this is, and the standard has been open sourced by now.

Not to mention, the number of times I’ve had ArcMap crash without any helpful information as to why it crashed...

That said, ArcMap is the Excel of GIS. It captured market share (especially government contracts) two or three decades ago and no one has disrupted the desktop GIS platform. On the web front, however, I see companies like MapBox far outpacing anything ESRI is capable of yet.

And to anyone looking to learn GIS: Post GIS, GDAL and any scripting language will make you more powerful than most of the people I know within the field.

> And to anyone looking to learn GIS: Post GIS, GDAL and any scripting language will make you more powerful than most of the people I know within the field.

Funny this article was posted today, because yesterday I was looking into rendering a custom map for a ~100x100 km area from OpenStreetMap data for a particular application. I've got basically no experience making maps but I've dabbled with GDAL and Rasterio. I was thinking of using Mapnik with a dump of (part of) the OpenStreetMap database into a local PostGIS instance. Ideally the rendered tiles should be vector format. Do you think this approach seems reasonable or am I missing a potentially simpler way?