John Solly

Hi, I'm John, a Software Engineer with a decade of experience building, deploying, and maintaining cloud-native geospatial solutions. I currently serve as a senior software engineer at New Light Technologies (NLT), where I work on a variety of infrastructure and application development projects.

Throughout my career, I've built applications on platforms like Esri and Mapbox while also leveraging open-source GIS technologies such as OpenLayers, GeoServer, and GDAL. This blog is where I share useful articles with the GeoDev community. Check out my portfolio to see my latest work!

Latest Posts!

Clean and modern blog page interface displaying a main blog post in the center with a large title, image, and a snippet of content. On the right side, there is a sidebar listing related posts with smaller images, titles, and brief descriptions. The design is minimalistic with a white background, black text, and accent colors like blue and green for highlights, making it visually appealing and easy to navigate.

Why Cosine Similarity Beats Tags for Blog Organization

June 12, 2024 in Web Dev

Last updated: July 04, 2024

4 min read

Organizing blog posts efficiently is crucial for enhancing user experience and ensuring readers can easily find related content. Traditionally, this has been achieved through tagging systems. In this post, I explore an alternative approach that leverages large language models and similarity scores to automate finding and displaying related posts, eliminating the need for traditional tagging.

Maximizing Sleep Quality: How to Use Red Screens on iOS and MacOS

May 04, 2024 in Productivity

Last updated: May 06, 2024

3 min read

Learn how to use accessibility settings on iOS and MacOS to limit blue light and promote better sleep.

Django to Astro: Migrating a Django Portfolio to Astro.js

April 05, 2024 in Web Dev

Last updated: April 17, 2024

5 min read

Migrating from Django to Astro.js, I simplified my web development workflow by adopting Astro's efficient, JSX-like templating for my portfolio. This transition not only streamlined the development process but also led to substantial savings on hosting costs, demonstrating Astro.js's value as a modern web development framework.