Released Lonboard v0.13! - New layer types: H3, S2, Geohash, A5 and fixed HeatmapLayer - Render data layers beneath Maplibre text labels - Map UI controls: scale, fullscreen, navigation - Significant performance improvements: fixing earlier regressions developmentseed.org/lonboard/lat...

I'm happy to announce I've been promoted to an Apache Arrow Committer, meaning I'm authorized to merge code patches into Arrow repositories! I join this list of amazing people: arrow.apache.org/committers/

New blog post! kylebarron.dev/blog/fast-py... This dives into performance pitfalls of Python bindings, why projects like Lonboard are so fast, and why I care about Apache Arrow so much. The post is high level and you don't need to know C/C++/Rust to understand it!

Our SIGMOD paper with our friends at Tsinghua + @wesmckinney.com + @pateljm.bsky.social on creating a next generation open-source data file format is out. F3 is a future-proof file format avoids the mistakes of Parquet. 📄 Paper: db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2025/... 📁 Code: github.com/future-file-...

Last week Apache Sedona announced SedonaDB...and now I finally get to write about it! Here I use SedonaDB to demonstrate the explore/iterate/visualize cycle...SedonaDB's CRS support + @kylebarron.dev's `lonboard` is 👌 for exploring new data!) dewey.dunnington.ca/post/2025/st...

New Lonboard release and new demo! Integrating marimo and Apache DataFusion to visualize the NYC taxi dataset. developmentseed.org/lonboard/lat...

Published a new version of parquet-wasm: github.com/kylebarron/p... - Update to latest version of Rust parquet crate - Workaround to read Parquet data containing Arrow string view/binary view types - Streaming writes - Comparison between parquet-wasm and hyparquet, a pure-JavaScript Parquet reader

Published arro3-core v0.6 with wider dtype support for converting numpy ndarrays to Arrow. It now additionally supports: - datetime64 - timedelta64 - fixed-width strings/bytes - variable-width strings - object arrays of str/bytes And the Python wheel is still just 2.5MB! github.com/kylebarron/a...

New GeoArrow-Rust release (& Python bindings) with a dedicated FlatGeobuf reader and writer: - Fast bounding box queries, pushed down to the original file format - Sync/async data reading through obstore - Fully Rust with no GDAL means easy installation geoarrow.org/geoarrow-rs/...

New blog post on Obstore, fast, multi-provider cloud storage access for Python: developmentseed.org/blog/2025-08...

New example notebook on visualizing Spatially-Partitioned GeoParquet with Lonboard, Obstore, and GeoArrow-Rust, using Overture Maps Foundation data! developmentseed.org/lonboard/lat...

When the Delta Lake Python bindings take a required dependency on your library 😅. 2.6M downloads a month! 😱 Guess I'll never be making a breaking release now!! pypistats.org/packages/arr... arro3-core is 15x smaller in your environment than pyarrow! kylebarron.dev/arro3/latest/

not every decade-old tech post holds up, but this one does: macwright.com/2012/06/13/p...

I'll be speaking at the NYC DataFusion meetup in September on geospatial support for DataFusion! lu.ma/qkcyycg0 DataFusion is a Rust-based query engine for building fast OLAP data processing systems. Compared to DuckDB, DataFusion is more modular and is designed to be embedded in larger systems.

🆕 #CNG2025 session recording @kylebarron.dev from @developmentseed.org introduces Obstore, a python library he wrote to access data on the cloud. Watch his talk to hear about the motivations for writing Obstore & its details ▶️ youtu.be/Wxh1G2oCZiU

Published v0.4 of the Rust GeoParquet crate: - Read all GeoParquet 1.1 files, including spatial filtering - Easier integration with upstream parquet crate read options - Support for adding bbox column when writing files - Sync and async for both reading and writing github.com/geoarrow/geo...

✨New Python bindings to GeoArrow and GeoParquet in Rust! This wrapper exposes a *full rewrite* of the GeoArrow Rust library, including support for the new Geometry(Collection) array types. It also supports reading and writing GeoParquet files, with spatial filtering. geoarrow.org/geoarrow-rs/...

Obstore v0.7 is out! The simplest Python cloud storage interface, powered by Rust - Anonymous connections to GCS - Obspec compatibility - Improvements to NASA Earthdata credential provider - Fixed creation of AzureStore from HTTPS URL - Improved documentation developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

Introducing Obspec: A Python protocol for interfacing with object storage Obspec is an alternative to fsspec. It defines a minimal Python interface to read, write, and modify data on object storage while acknowledging that object storage is *not* a filesystem. developmentseed.org/obspec/lates...

Lonboard v0.11 is released! - Choose between a tooltip and side panel for inspecting data - Supports GeoArrow box arrays from 0.2 spec - fixes some DuckDB and CSS bugs - Ensures compatibility with geoarrow-pyarrow v0.2 See full changelog: github.com/developments...

Published version 0.4 of the GeoArrow Rust library! It's been fully rewritten from scratch, has a much more stable core, and supports all of the GeoArrow 0.2 specification. geoarrow.org/geoarrow-rs/...

Really excited for version 0.2 of GeoArrow! This has been years in the making and adds: - Geometry, GeometryCollection, Box types. We can now represent mixed-type geometries in an array - New ways to represent CRS. See the release post for more information: geoarrow.org/news/release...

GDAL 3.11 released 🚀 github.com/OSGeo/gdal/r...

We found similar results when we first benchmarked #icechunk. Our conclusion: doing IO with a Rust backend is much faster than Python. 👇Really exciting to see @kylebarron.dev's Obstore backend for Zarr-Python ship today.

With today's Zarr Python release, switch to the new obstore-based backend for **3x faster** reading from S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure than the default fsspec backend. zarr.readthedocs.io/en/stable/us... developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

Finally a new #Shapely feature release! 🎉 Shapely 2.1.0 highlights include initial support for geometries with M or ZM values, functionality for coverage validation and simplification, and much more. For a full overview, see shapely.readthedocs.io/en/latest/re... #python #geopython #geospatial

I'm looking forward to the Cloud Native Geo conference next month! I'll be presenting on Obstore and a growing ecosystem of Python libraries that enjoy faster, simpler access to cloud resources.

Obstore v0.6 brings simple, painless integration with Microsoft Planetary Computer! - *Automatic token refresh*. No need to manually fetch SAS tokens and never think about token expiration times again. - STAC API integration developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

Published v0.1 of async-tiff, a Rust crate and Python library for low-level, async reading of TIFF and GeoTIFF files. There's high potential for improved performance when opening many TIFF files concurrently, esp in Python server environments github.com/developments...

Published obstore 0.5, the fastest Python interface to S3, GCS & Azure - Benchmarks: *2.8x higher throughput* than aioboto3 for many small, concurrent requests - Custom credential providers, automatic token refresh - Improved docs, type hints, fsspec integration developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

So awesome to see my amazing coworker @batpad.bsky.social having his work featured in the Museum of Modern Art here in NYC!!

🎉 The "Geocomputation with Python" book has been officially published today! Dive into the world of spatial analysis and geospatial data with Python. 📖🐍 Book's website: https://buff.ly/3NK2uBq #geocompx #geopython #spatialanalysis

New release of obstore: the simplest, highest-throughput Python interface to S3, GCS & Azure Storage! - Pickle support, to unblock usage in Dask and Zarr - Easier one-line store creation - Open remote objects as file-like readers or writers - Improved docs developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

Really cool to see @gadom.ski 's work integrating Rust-Python for the STAC ecosystem www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdCJ...

I didn't know anything about this -- Feb 11 there is a Rust NYC meetup feature DataFusion: www.meetup.com/rust-nyc/eve...

listen if you're interested in 🌍 geospatial companies or 💰 the existential weight of attempting to run a business or 👴🏻 my feelings on open source and realtime tech and stuff!

New obstore v0.3 for easy access to S3, GCS, and Azure Storage! - Easy **streaming** downloads, uploads, and copies across object stores via async iterators - Streaming list, with no pagination - Easier configuration with improved type hints - Fsspec integration developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

Really happy for myself and @developmentseed.org to be part of GeoJupyter, an initiative to improve interactive mapping and analysis in @projectjupyter.bsky.social notebooks. geojupyter.org/blog/2025010...

Occasionally that orange site (hn) digs up true gems. Today, an article documenting the development of my all-time fave video game, Railroad Tycoon II, published in 1998! Funny timing; over break I figured out how to install it on a Mac (and spent ~30 hrs playing it) www.filfre.net/2025/01/rail...

Thread with satellite imagery of the California wildfires.

Spatial indexes, and RTrees specifically, are at the core of geospatial software. But ever wondered how an RTree is actually implemented? In this post we’ll dive into the implementation of Flatbush, an elegant, blazing-fast, memory-efficient RTree. kylebarron.dev/literate-fla...

Releasing geo-index 0.2: Fast, memory-efficient, zero-copy spatial indexes (RTree & KDTree) for Python & Rust. - Range, nearest-neighbor queries - Persist indexes as bytes, reuse them later - Supports float32 for 2x less memory - Enables GeoParquet spatial partitioning github.com/kylebarron/g...

If you need a quick, but fairly deep introduction to GeoParquet -- I recommend you to listen to an episode of the MapScaping podcast with Kyle Barron. https://buff.ly/3D23bn7 #gischat #rspatial #geopython

Happy congestion pricing day!!

👇 TIL you can download "Apache Iceberg--The Definitive Guide" from O'Reilly for free. Based on reading the first chapter of it before losing my (paper) copy on an aircraft last year, I can recommend it 🤓.

github.com/apache/arrow... Xiangpeng is at it again. Another 10-15% end to end better performance by optimizing the lowest levels of Parquet decoding. This is the last trick I know of to squeeze performance out of parquet reading

Being 100% serious, for me what's described here is a big part of Rust's success. It's fun. And it makes things that are often un-fun (installing the toolchain, adding dependencies) easy.

Yet another impressive DataFusion Python release. This time with interoperability improvements with PyCapsule and FFI. datafusion.apache.org/blog/2024/12...

Moon – ciechanow.ski/moon/

Was a pleasure to be interviewed for the @cloudnativegeo.org blog! cloudnativegeo.org/blog/2024/12...