Christa's GIS Archive

The final Python module is here, Module 6! I forgot how quickly summer semesters can go by, but I'm glad I was able to cover so much ground in Python. It feels like night and day compared to the very first script we handled at the beginning of this course. Now, look at us, we've moved on to working with geometries, where we had to learn about geometry objects and multipart features, as well as reading and writing geometries. Search Cursors came back to play with iterating over the Hawaii rivers shapefile. We had to take the 26 rivers within and create a TXT file that provided each river's name, ID, vertices, and coordinate data (X & Y). I had a nice time working through this one, with minimal hiccups. The first part of the script is always the environment, and setting up my environment is becoming second nature -- I don't think I'll forget to import any necessary modules in the future. The second part of the script required creating a TXT file. This part gave me...

As someone who can be too curious for her own good, I found Module 5 enlightening for my adventurous side, as it covered data exploration and manipulation. We tackled a lot of data description and listing, lists and dictionaries, as well as Search, Update, and Insert Cursors. This module took us to Alaska and New Mexico using shapefiles. Definitely the most intriguing part of this lab for me was manipulating spatial data. As much of the work we do at my job involves updating attributes, I am already itching to automate similar tasks in my workflows, which would save me a lot of headaches and time and reduce human error. This week's script was another free-rein script, where we got to build it from scratch. Although the lab instructions did request us to use certain GetMessage() functions, line structures, and the sort, which was not a huge issue. It reminds me of the many ways you could go about it. Before I even looked at the lab instructions, I tried to build the script based on ...

It's crazy, but I think I had the biggest "A-ha!" moment this week while scripting in this week's lab. It felt like such a lightbulb moment when I realized I was really comprehending the script as I built it from the ground up. Honestly, over the past couple of weeks, I've been reviewing the scripts we maintain at work, and they make more sense than they did when I was learning Python early in my GIS career. As straightforward and obvious as it is, it's funny how, when you actually dedicate time and focus on something, things begin to fall into place and click oh-so-satisfyingly. This week's module focused on all things geoprocessing! I'm very familiar with the tools specified in this lab, including Clip, Erase, Add XY, and Buffer. It made me feel right at home, which was pleasant. The first half of the lab required us to work in Model Builder, which is integrated in ArcGIS Pro. It's a very user-friendly way to run these geoprocessing and analysis ...