When I put images on this blog, I try and manage down the file sizes so browsers aren’t having to load multi-megabyte images for no reason. Since I use Jekyll and a very simple setup of static files with minimal processing tools, I need to do this manually. For years when I wanted to optimize an image file quickly, I’d upload to TinyPNG and redownload the shrunken version. Super simple.

But I wanted a way to do this on the command line rapidly, and to be able to write scripts to batch process images if I need to...

Inspired by a couple of others, I released a micro project of mine called Terra, to provide a fast way to run several geospatial tools on your computer.

Because I work with a variety of GIS datasets, I end up writing lots of scripts and small automation utilities to manipulate, convert, and merge data, in tons of different formats. Working with geo data at scale like this challenges the non-software developer to get comfortable with basic scripting and programming. I’ve learned a ton in the last couple years about Unix environments,...