What I Learned from My Wife's College GIS Lab Assignments

By Kevin Mayo, Founder, FLIPSIDEGEO

Process Summaries and Blog Posts

One of the first things I noticed watching my wife work through the University of West Florida GIS Certificate program wasn't a complicated geoprocessing model or a clever Python script.

It was the requirement to complete a process summary and to prepare a blog post for every assignment during the year long, immersive GIS program at UWF.

Every week went pretty much the same way.  Learn something new, grind through a lab assignment, complete a process summary and prepare a follow-up blog post.  From there she moved right on to the next module.

UWF students begin building a history and an online portfolio of their work from day one. In a fast-paced program where everything doesn't always make sense right away, that's a huge advantage. When my wife went back and read her week one blog post just a couple of weeks into the program, things started to click.

If a student needs to prepare for a job interview, they can go review the blog as a refresher.

Even better, they can share the blog as a project portfolio with a potential employer. 

Way to go, UWF GIS Department! The best assignments don't end when the semester is over. They're the kind that keep paying off long after graduation.

Then I started thinking about how all of this applies to my own work as a GIS Consultant...

It’s been a busy year so far.  I’ve been working on projects with quick turn-around times.  It’s finish one job and right on to the next. 

I spend a good amount of time working on projects that someone else built years ago. Sometimes the old apps work. Sometimes they don't.  The biggest challenge isn't fixing broken technology—it's figuring out how the systems were put together in the first place.

I've left my share of projects behind without good documentation over the years.  No excuses here, but it's a safe bet I was already focused on the next deadline and I let it slide.

Watching my wife pause and reflect after every lab inspired me to do something similar at the end of my own projects. 

Capture what you learned while you still remember it.

We have all been trained to write good documentation, but the only thing some of us leave behind is a lame readme.txt file that reads something like the following.

“Run this script once a month.”

It's not helpful at all six months from now if something goes wrong.

Over the last year, I made it a habit to write a one-page Word doc at the end of my projects. I’ve been pretty good about it, but it takes me way too long.  I obsess over every line even though there's a solid chance I'll be the only person who ever reads it. 

It’s been a painful and tragic waste of time, but there is hope on the horizon.

But first, just admit it...

There's probably an AI chat open on your second monitor right now.

It's OK. Mine is sitting next to the legal pad I've been scribbling notes in for years.

The biggest surprise wasn’t that AI could write code out of thin air.  Code is AI's native language, of course it can do that! 

What got me hooked was discovering that AI is the best whiteboard I've ever used.  It even talks back to me, unlike my trusty old legal pad.

I use AI during most of my projects now.  I work out the logic in my head, I ask AI to challenge my assumptions, I have AI organize my notes and capture ideas before I forget them, and I argue with AI when I know that it's hallucinating. The back-and-forth has become a valuable part of my process and saves me loads of time.

By the time a project is finished, documentation isn't something I have to remember to write.

It's already there.

I spent way too much time trying to force AI to magically plug chat history into a reusable Word template.  AI struggled with Word formatting way more than I expected and it returned some wild results.  I didn’t get exactly what I wanted out of the wrestling match, but I figured out a way to get 98% of the way there using a slightly different approach.

At some point, I stopped trying to make AI produce the perfect Word document. Instead, I let it do what it's good at—organizing my thoughts. Once the content was right, I exported clean HTML, opened it in Word, and finished the document myself.

The final two percent is what I enjoy about these project closeout reports. It's the creative part where I get to add my own style to an otherwise boring technical document. Years from now, when I open one of those reports, I know exactly who wrote it.

The last section of my project closeout report nearly mirrors my wife’s lab process document.

I have a nerdy GIS blog of my own now too. 

It all started with inspiration from my wife’s college lab deliverables.

Leave something better behind than a lame readme.txt for the next person.

Who knows?

That person could be you...