Hi, I’m Patrick Smyth. I build geospatial software — and I try to make it feel effortless to use.

For 12+ years I’ve lived at the intersection of data engineering, mapping, and product design. I’ve shipped pipelines that ingest millions of features, modeled schemas and graphs for real-world places and processes, and designed clean, intuitive interfaces so people can actually use maps effectively. My happy place is where PostGIS meets Python meets “this should be obvious to the user.”

What I write about here

• Practical, scalable geospatial patterns (PostGIS, Python, cloud ETL).

• Structuring messy location data for reliability and speed.

• Aproaches to data models and graphs

• LLMs in geospatial workflows—what helps, what’s hype, and how to keep costs sane.

• Reproducible dev: Dockerized environments, tests, and docs that invite contribution.

Turning complex spatial analysis into humane products.