mapgl 0.5.0 for R lets you sync up as many maps as your browser can handle. Shown here: 16 distinct demographic maps for the Atlanta area; interact with one, the other 15 are kept in sync. Now I'm not necessarily recommending a 16-panel map... but it's fun to see what's possible.

Vignette: optimized corridor routing over cost surfaces in R. Useful for pipeline routing, transmission line planning, trail planning, wildlife connectivity modeling, and more. walker-data.com/spopt-r/arti...

Version 0.2.0 of freestiler, a Rust-powered vector tiling engine for R and Python, has landed on CRAN and PyPI. The highlight: produce vector tiles with dynamic H3 hexagonal binning built-in. Learn how: walker-data.com/freestiler/a...

The new slider control in R's mapgl package (v0.5.0) isn't just for time-based filtering. Give it a list of paint expressions and you can animate changes over time on your map. Example: population changes at the tract level in Florida, animated in 3D.

A bivariate look at high-tech employment share and net migration across NUTS2 regions in Europe. Interactively mapped with R's mapgl using the new bivariate choropleth feature, now available in the package's 0.5.0 release. Credit to @milos-makes-maps.bsky.social for his inspirational examples!

Animated, hierarchical origin-destination commute flows in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX. Downtowns, medical districts, airports, and suburban job hubs light up from 2023 LODES data. Now available in R's mapgl 0.5.0. Credit to @ekotov.pro for the implementation and @ilyabo.bsky.social for Flowmap.gl!

The upcoming v0.5 release of mapgl for #rstats is going to be massive. Included: a slider control that allows for interactive data filtering - no Shiny required. Thanks to @ekotov.pro - brush a window over a histogram, see your data filter in real-time Lots more examples to share this week

Working on H3 integration into freestiler, my R/Python vector tiling tool. The new feature uses @duckdb.org internally to dynamically aggregate points into a multi-layer hexagonal tileset based on some function (summary stats, or your own custom SQL). Tiled here: 12M US groundwater wells

I grew up in Oregon without air conditioning, it seemed quite normal at the time, we just pulled out the box fans when it got hot in the summer. Fascinating to explore the patterns in this new Census data - lots of areas around Oregon / the US where AC prevalence isn't as high as you might expect.

Final reminder: today's the last day to grab my Census / mapping workshop catalog before the store shuts down tonight. Lifetime access to 25+ hours of recordings, 11 custom tutorials, $99. I really appreciate all of you who have bought it this week!

Mapped: the % of occupied housing units without air conditioning by Census tract. Uses the new U.S. Census Bureau LACE dataset. Map the data yourselves: gist.github.com/walkerke/71e...

I'm archiving my R mapping & Census data workshop catalog permanently on Friday. walkerdata.gumroad.com/l/all-worksh... I've had a great time building examples for these workshops over the years. Here are a few of my favorites:

146 million US jobs. Visualized by sector on a fast, filterable interactive map. Fly from market to market smoothly with @maptiler.bsky.social's geocoder. Explore for yourselves: walker-data.com/freestiler/l...

One of my favorite features in R's mapgl package: create custom, branded pop-ups for your interactive maps. Build a map template then use your AI agent to craft a pop-up that looks just the way you want. Learn how - workshops go away for good on Friday: walkerdata.gumroad.com/l/all-worksh...

The largest cities by area in the US that are not consolidated city-counties are: 1. Houston 2. Oklahoma City 3. Phoenix 4. San Antonio Here's NYC (inclusive of interior water) super-imposed over all four. Explore city sizes with my tool: walker-data.com/maps...

I'm retiring my R workshops. I'm as committed to R as ever, but the market for workshops has shifted & I'm focusing on other exciting ventures. I bundled the full catalog for $99; grab it (25+ hours, 11 tutorials) before I archive it on Friday. walkerdata.gumroad.com/l/all-worksh...

City boundaries in the US can be strange. I built a tool to help you explore and compare them. Choose a city, drag it around the map, compare with other cities in the US. Try it out: walker-data.com/maps/city-co...

I love living in Fort Worth. And I think it's cool that we're now the 10th largest city by population in the US. But it's important to put this into context.

An interactive legend color picker is coming to the next release of R's mapgl package. Specify a list of color ramp functions when you generate your palette for mapping; your data will automatically re-style with no need for Shiny. Learn more: walker-data.com/mapgl/articl...

Lots of new features landing in R's mapgl package as it approaches an 0.5.0 release. Today's drop: - An interactive color ramp picker for your legends - Native bivariate choropleth mapping Learn more: walker-data.com/mapg...

Not "flashy" for social media, but some useful quality-of-life features have landed in the development version of R's mapgl package: - Bezier curves and Bezier polygons in the draw control; - A coordinates control to track your mouse position (decimal or DMS);

In geospatial right now there's so much focus on AI and automating our work. But I still think there's room for hands-on exploration and careful, expert-guided spatial analysis. Just recorded this quick walkthrough on some brand-new features in mapgl. riverside.com/shared/expor...

spopt, an R package for spatial optimization, is now in general release on CRAN. spopt-r is inspired by the Python package of the same name. Features include: - Regionalization algorithms for building contiguous districts / territories; - Facility location solvers;

Putting Codex 5.5 through its paces today. Some really cool (and useful) features, like interactive attribute editing, will be landing in #rstats's mapgl shortly...

Mapping healthcare jobs clusters in Texas cities. Explore and filter the data yourselves: walker-data.com/free...

Clustering is a highly effective technique for visualizing dense geospatial point data. With freestiler, you can build cluster-aware tilesets that intelligently aggregate points until you hit a desired max cluster zoom level. Shown here: visualizing 5 million points smoothly with clustering.

146 million US jobs. Styled by category on a fast, filterable interactive map. Explore it here: walker-data.com/freestiler/l... The map is powered by {freestiler}, a Rust-powered vector tiling tool that is now available in general release on CRAN.

Visualizing a time-series of Texas mining, quarrying, and oil & gas extraction jobs (NAICS21) by Census tract between 2002 and 2023 in 3D. Featuring a native slider control for R's mapgl package, currently in development.

A new release of the mapgl R package (0.4.6) is now on CRAN. Get your hands on some major updates: - Static map helpers for image output / inclusion in Quarto reports; - Support for categorical rasters; - The latest @Mapbox GL JS with native PMTiles support

Facility and route optimization on road network graphs can solve countless problems across many industries. However, these solvers often require expensive software to set up and run them, or expensive, rate-limited travel-time matrix APIs. The spopt-r R package offers a solution.

🎯 [TIP de R - RECURSO 📚] ¿Mapas interactivos sin servidores externos? Con {freestiler} creá archivos PMTiles desde R, ¡súper rápido y sin dependencias! Ideal para Shiny/Quarto. Más info: walker-data.com/freestiler/a... ✍🏽 @kylewalker.bsky.social #RStats #RStatsES #Rtips #DataScience

The Huff model is the classic algorithm in retail spatial analysis - and you can now use it in R. Predict: - Which store a customer is likely to visit - Sales potential per location - How new stores reshape the competitive landscape Learn more: walker-data.com/spop...

New in spopt-r: optimized corridor routing on cost surfaces. Vignette: how to optimize a route for a produced water pipeline in Appalachia. Build a friction raster from inputs like terrain & land cover, then find the least cost path and evaluate diverse scenarios. walker-data.com/spopt-r/arti...

An important tech use-case for LLMs that isn’t pure coding is deploying and managing cloud services For example, Google Cloud Platform is powerful but a total maze to navigate LLMs help me work through the menus, understand the CLIs, and prep deployment scripts

Just implemented: support for categorical {terra} rasters in R's mapgl. Shown here: 7.6 million 300m x 300m grid cells across Texas derived from the 2024 NLCD, running fast natively in MapLibre. Closes a 2-year-old issue - was one that was more difficult to figure out than it seemed!

Teaching Gemma 4 (26b MoE) how to map Census data in R via OpenCode & oMLX in the Zed IDE. It's the first local LLM I've used that gets me real-time responsiveness. Running on a MacBook Pro M2 MAX, 64GB RAM. Not as smart as the frontier models - but it's running for free on my own hardware.

Set up Gemma 4 (26b MoE) via OpenCode and omlx for agentic coding on my MacBook It’s no Opus 4.6, but this is the first local model I’ve used that is actually capable of real work on my laptop

Can AI map land data in survey plats? Absolutely, if you set it up right. Shown here: extracting the surface hole, penetration point, and bottom hole coordinates from a permit plat PDF and plotting them with the lateral on an interactive map.

The freestiler R / Python package has been around for a month now, and it's proving to be one of the most useful tools I've built. Vector tiles are a must for high-performance visualization of large geospatial datasets, but creating vector tiles has long been tricky without specialized expertise.

New in the R mapgl package: static maps! I developed mapgl to bring my favorite interactive mapping libraries to R. But - interactive maps are by definition hard to share in non-interactive formats. I'm rolling out a couple new functions I'm already finding useful:

I'm struggling with an answer to "Can you share the code?" I've always been a big believer in open source software. I built my career on it. When I post a cool project / demo, inevitably I get the question "can you share the code?"

850,000 parcels in New York City. All visualized on an interactive map in 3D by estimated market value per square foot. Filtered dynamically in the browser with an interactive legend.

Our beloved Claude - even with access in this case to multiple years of conversations with me about mapping - defaults to a year-and-a-half-old release of MapLibre. A large percentage of people using AI uncritically are actually 18 months behind. Use this to your advantage.

A personal and professional goal of mine is to always be using and developing tools that Claude doesn’t know about yet by default

This is why I'm so excited about my new R/Python package, {freestiler}. I connect to a 146M row @duckdb.org database; generate vector tiles for 2.8 million jobs in CO from a query; serve the tiles and visualize on a @maplibre.org map. All in seconds! Get started: walker-data.com/freestiler

I work with AI agents daily. It is becoming more and more difficult to tell between when answers look right and are right, and when they look right and are wrong. Even more difficult: when answers look right but are suboptimal. Take the human out of the loop at your own risk.

An irony that's not lost on me: My older R packages that I wrote by hand have limited to no test coverage, in large part because of how time consuming it is to write tests, whereas; My newer, LLM-assisted R packages have comprehensive test coverage

Another update to R's spopt-r package: you can specify "required" and "candidate" facilities in max coverage / location-allocation solvers Brief demo: choosing the best new fire stations from candidate points in Fort Worth Same functionality here as ArcGIS's Network Analyst

I tend to be a CRAN-appreciator. But wow, R-Universe is such a useful project. As a developer, I can: - Experiment with new and creative approaches that would never get accepted on CRAN; - Have cross-platform binaries for my packages built within an hour (usually) of a GitHub push

New in the spopt-r #rstats package: route optimization. Solve the classic Traveling Salesman Problem for a single driver or optimize a fleet by solving the Vehicle Routing Problem. Written in Rust so they solve fast. Read the vignette which covers r5r integration: walker-data.com/spop...