Johannes (Hannes) Kröger is a geospatial professional from Hamburg, Germany. During most of this interview, Hannes was working as a research assistant in the Lab for Geoinformatics and Geovisualization (g2lab) at HafenCity University Hamburg. Recently Hannes joined a consulting firm to challenge his expertise in the real world. His unprofessional outlet is a chaotic stream of things at https://twitter.com/cartocalypse.
Hannes was interviewed for GeoHipster by Kurt Menke.
Q: Hannes Kröger, where are you located and what do you do?
A: I was born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, still live here and love this green city near the river. For more than 4 years I have been working as a research assistant (and pretend-PhD-student) in the Lab for Geoinformatics and Geovisualization at the small HafenCity Universität Hamburg. Most of my time was spent on teaching (mostly programming-related) but every now and then there were exciting projects to dive into. I introduced Python as go-to programming language in the study program and am damn proud and happy about that!
Q: How did you get into Geo/GIS?
A: I grew up in a family of sailors, so from an early age on nautical charts and maps were a common sight. Globes also always fascinated me. Later I became the designated navigator when sailing with friends, which involved lots of button pressing on our trusty Garmin GPS 12 unit. That device enabled a friend and me to go geocaching back when it was still a very special thing (there was just a low two digit number of caches in the whole metro area of Hamburg, iirc). Later I discovered OpenStreetMap and enjoyed mapping parts of my city, when not even the main roads were fully connected yet. It felt special, important, and so motivating: there was a map visibly growing in coverage day after day. That was awesome!
After school, when I was lost and wondering what to do, a friend suggested that her study program, Geomatics, would be something fitting my interests. I enrolled and felt at home quickly. I remember professors laughing at my enthusiasm for OSM, that inferior, easily manipulated, non-official data source. Ha, who’s laughing now! And luckily, struggling to get ArcGIS to run on Linux with Wine (I use Arch Linux btw), I discovered QGIS, completed my homework map in it, got asked by a colleague how I made it look so good and shortly after I never touched ArcGIS again. No regrets!
Q: Your enthusiasm for all things geo is evident to anyone who follows you on Twitter! Can you give us some examples of some exciting projects you are involved with and what softwares are involved?
A: Twitter is kind of my exhaust pipe for every-day experiments. I tend to lose interest after the proof-of-concept state, and I am not into marketing mundane things. So many prototypes never see a deserved polishing.
As most of my university job was filled by teaching and related duties, I usually did the exciting stuff in my free time. I find benchmarking different GeoTIFF compression and predictor settings with GDAL exciting in case you were wondering. And I will never get bored with silly geometric things in QGIS: Fake Chromatic Aberration and Dynamic Label Shadows in QGIS | Making a Star Wars Hologram in QGIS | making Flowers in QGIS,
or Dynamic elevation profile lines (“Joy Division” maps).
Doing Average Earth From Space from satellite data was lots of fun. The tools involved were wget, ffmpeg, imagemagick, gdal, lots of Bash scripting with various unixy tools and a bit of Python.
And while I also like to just play around with newly released software, I am hipster enough to usually groan and think “wait, $existing_free_software can do that already if you just learned it, you clueless developer with your NIH syndrome”.
Q: It is amazing what you can do by combining geometry generators, blending modes, live layer effects, functions/variables, and data defined overrides in QGIS! Do you ever find a way to sneak these techniques into the classroom?
A: It is so much fun! Being able to manipulate and animate geodata through those means enables me to feel like the little procedural cARTographist I wish I was. Some of my very first (BASIC) programs were explorations of geometric concepts we had just learned about in school and my fascination for that never ceased.
That one GIS course I was co-teaching was fairly basic and focuses on GIS itself but since my colleague and I were (and are!) passionate about cartography, we also showed things like QGIS draw effects and blending modes to the students. And let me tell you, everybody loves drop shadows!
Q: What’s your take on the Shapefile?
A: It is simple and it came early. Thus it’s widely supported, but also really dumb and antiquated. Seriously, it is. I wish its proponents would consider the benefits of a single-file format that supports metadata and more. Have they never gotten just “data.shp” in a mail?
By the way, did you know that @shapefiIe is actually using an upper-case “i” for the “l” bit because the true handle was taken already? What a deceitful fraud! @GeoPackage1 on the other hand, now that is one classy, prophetic name!
Q: What do you do for fun outside when you’re not teaching or playing with visualizations?
A: I write this answer from the Scottish highlands where I ended up spontaneously for a hike along Loch Lochy (huehuehue!) and Loch Ness. A considerable part of that is battling rural public transport and the unpredictable weather. I love the outdoors. Probably the sailing navigator’s cartography genes. Anyone got a boat for me?
Q: Are you a geohipster? Why/why not?
A: You people always want to label people like me, pffft. Well actually, I strictly limit myself to home-grown, sustainable FLOSS GIS software; I have strong opinions about data compression; I think Mapbox is pretty evil; I like neither Vinyl nor Shapefiles; I thought a lot about using semicolon here; and I use Arch Linux. I am ambivalent on the question and I know I’m right about that. So, yeah, I wish I wasn’t which just makes me one even more so.
Q: Any words of wisdom for our readers?
A: File bug reports if you want your tools to improve.
When you file a bug with a free and open-source project, take a moment to browse through open issues. Maybe you can give some input, maybe you can help a person who looked for tech support.
And always consider the humans behind the code, they are what makes it tick, and you should appreciate their generosity no matter what just happened to your project’s files. Backup is cheap.
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