Joel McCune - Joel McCune

Joel McCune

Life is a River

Life is a River

Life is an adventure, a journey with no map. The only way is forward. Life is an exploratory river trip. > Too many times we stand aside And let the waters slip away Till what we put off till tomorrow Has now become today So don't you sit upon the shoreline

Growth for the Sake of Growth

Growth for the Sake of Growth

> "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." -Edward Abbey It has been nearly 30 years since I first read those words. Of all the outdoor books I read growing up (there were a lot), this single quote from The Journey Home has stuck in

Not As Good As I Once Was...

Not As Good As I Once Was...

There are a lot of things easier about being in my 40's, but being at the pinnacle of ahleticism is not one of the them. Few have the opportunity to achieve a regional, national or international level in sport. I was lucky enough to experience a national level and dip

Outdoor Geography - Again

Outdoor Geography - Again

The real reason I became interested in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) had nothing to do with getting a job. It had everything to do with wandering around in the woods, finding things, and getting back to them. Strangely, in the interim, somehow I now find myself inside (in a basement

ArcGIS Pro Ensure Minimum Version in Python

Functionality is continually added to ArcGIS Pro. When creating Python scripts taking advantage of new functionality, it is helpful to be able to check the version to either use an alternative method, or at least provide an error message informing the end user of needing to upgrade. Fortunately, ArcPy provides

Outdoor Stories

Geography Matters

Outdoor Stories

Outdoor enthusiasts are inherently geographers and storytellers. Wandering around outside requires some level of geographic literacy just to get there and back. It does not take more than a few minutes with anybody who loves the outdoors to discover reminiscing about experiences, telling stories, also is an inherent part of

ArcPy Describe <dot> Properties

A tremendous amount of information is available through arcpy.Describe. Until ArcGIS Pro 2.8 though, figuring out what properties were available for the object you had just described required digging into the documentation pretty deep. Now, it is much easier to access these properties introspectively as a dictionary. Since

Pandas DataFrame to Markdown

Over the last few months I have been including markdown representations of data frames quite a bit to put in documentation to show what the table outputs look like. Using Jupyter it is not overly difficult to use the df.to_markdown() method, and copy the output in the notebook.

GroupBy and Aggregate Using Pandas

Python, data munging

GroupBy and Aggregate Using Pandas

Remove duplicates in one column, and create a list of tags in another column using Pandas. Consider this. I have a table of data. With me, yes, I know, big surprise. This table of data has a column with values, and some of these values repeat. This is the names

Python Dictionary as Object

Python Dictionary as Object

It's something simple enough, I just want to take a dictionary and have the ablity to access the properties using dot syntax. Consider, if I have a dictionary such as the following... my_dict = { 'one_value': 'something sweet', 'two_value': 'something even sweeter', 'nested_value': { 'n1': 'buried value', 'n2': 'another

Fixing Mac .bash_profile

Murphy, who was he and why is his law so recurrent? Apparently, there are people who spend an inordinate amount of time unpacking the history of Murphy's Law [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law]. Myself, I typically use a liberal helping of my best sailor's vocabulary when encountering

Get SafeGraph Patterns by POI ID Using an AWS EC2 Instance

Get SafeGraph Patterns by POI ID Using an AWS EC2 Instance

Retrieve SafeGraph Patterns Data for Only Specific Points-of-Interest(POI) Using an Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud Instance "What the heck did he just say?" Yes, even for a large proportion of the technical people who visit my blog, this very well may sound like gibberish. Further, even for those

Conda and ArcGIS Pro 2.7

Conda and ArcGIS Pro 2.7

For those of us who regularly work with Python and ArcGIS, especially for data science, life just got a lot easier with ArcGIS Pro 2.7. Now, arcpy can be installed just like any other Conda package. This means ArcGIS Pro now can coexist on the same machine and play nicely with Conda.

COVID Office Evolution

COVID Office Evolution

For a long time I resisted creating a home office. We live in an 1,800 square foot house built in 1924. About a year ago, we moved the boys into the same bedroom, and my wife took over the nursery as an office since she works from home, pandemic

Geography Matters...Again

Geography Matters...Again

When the world was big, geography mattered a whole lot. As travel became easier, trade almost trivial, and the world became smaller, geographic interest waned. Now, in the midst of a pandemic, suddenly geography matters a lot...again.

The Best Laid Plans - I Miss the River

The Best Laid Plans - I Miss the River

Almost four years ago now, I got the opportunity to run the Little White Salmon for the first time. Over a decade ago, I recall seeing the first ever full color centerfold in American Whitewater, and although I had spent arguably all of my life paddling, I could not recognize

Covocalypse Part 1

Covocalypse Part 1

In today's world of follow-me drones, GoPro heros, and cell phone cameras, I find myself looking at a lot more photos and videos shared online with little explanation. It makes me yearn for the evenings viewing a screen set up in a living room displaying color slides and listening, spellbound,

Cloning ArcGIS Conda Environments

ArcGIS Pro, when initially released, included an incredibly powerful capability, the included Python environment is a Conda environment. This unlocks the extremely powerful and vast universe of installable packages available through Conda. Further, using Conda environments enables ensuring a project can be successfully moved to another machine, and successfully run

Create `arcgis` Conda Environment with a Batch File

Although first and foremost a Geographer, after transitioning to the GeoAI Business Development Team at Esri, now I spend most of my time in Jupyter Lab. Although not altogther difficult, if following best practices, when installing other packages and modifying the primary Conda environment shipped with ArcGIS Pro, arcgispro-py3, you

Automatically Convert to Esri Spatially Enabled Dataframe

I frequnetly need a Spatially Enabled Dataframe from a variety of sources, and these sources frequently change. Guessing there is a very good chance I am not the only one doing this - here is my solution to this as a Gist you are more than welcome to use.

Relative Module Imports in an ArcGIS Python Toolbox

The idea of ArcGIS Python toolboxes really appeals to me. I really like them. As is frequently the case in life, the devil is in the details. Python Toolboxes have plenty of interesting personality quirks. Among these is relative module imports when creating Python Toolboxes for ArcGIS Pro. Here is

Layer to Spatially Enabled DataFrame

As I continue to dive deeper and deeper into the intersection of Geography and Artifical Intelligence - what we are calling GeoAI, I find myself doing a lot of data work. This means I liberally blend the two Esri Python libraries, ArcPy [http://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/arcpy/get-started/

Purge Scratch GeoDatabase

In a lot of the scripts I write, especially data preparation pipelines, I use the scratch Geodatabase - a lot. At the end of these pipelines, especially when testing and re-running the processes multiple times, I like to clean out this workspace to ensure my results are the new results,

Outfitting a Pyranha 9R as a C1

Outfitting a Pyranha 9R as a C1

Kaykers have it so easy. Outfitting a boat consists of shoving a few slivers of foam in for hip blocks, adjusting the bulkhead and backhand, and hitting it. It takes, at most, about five minutes. But, I do not kayak. Frankly, I never have. I paddle C1 exclusively - always

ArcGIS-ML-Docker

ArcGIS-ML-Docker

Easily 80 percent of my time at work is now spent in ArcGIS Python API [https://developers.arcgis.com/python/], either the stable branch, or much of the time, the daily build. Frequently I switch between these environments, but also need a few other Conda packages to support machine learning.