A lot of people this post are trying to reach don’t know about ArcGIS. As someone who does know about the GIS field, it is frustrating to see post after post about how to do GIS the hard way. The article is fine, but the whole process could have been much easier using the ArcGIS system, and instead of a PDF you’d get full REST services and a suite of apps to work with them.

This post doesn’t mention ArcGIS at all, except for as a data source that your county government probably uses.

I remember when I didn’t know about ArcGIS and thought it was cool to build apps that put points on MapBox maps - which I later found out is a waste of time, because ArcGIS already does that job well.

I think this post leaves people with the impression that GIS is niche, or difficult, or not accessible to lay users. My personal opinion is that recent advancements in Web GIS make the field about as accessible to people as things like word processing, while QGIS is stuck in the ArcMap days, catering exclusively to trained GIS professionals.

It is absolutely meaningful to point out that you don’t need to be a trained data engineer to do this kind of work, and that this 4,000 word journey could have been done in 10 minutes of clicking around user-friendly software.