iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The upcoming release of the mapgl #rstats package supports donut charts for circle clustering. This won't be everyone's favorite technique, but I like how you can visualize the internal composition of clusters. Try it out live by clicking the "Clusters" option: walker-data.com/maps/census-...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The improved clustering engine in the next release of freestiler can scale beyond a billion points with smooth performance. I've got a powerful MacBook but I did all the processing on a laptop. So many possibilities are getting unlocked in geospatial right now.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"Fade on zoom" is one of my favorite cartographic techniques. Interpolate a layer's opacity by zoom level to progressively show more data and eventually show all data at full zoom. Try it live in my latest project which maps the 2020 US Census by age group: walker-data.com/maps/census-...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The classic Racial Dot Map inspired me and a whole generation of mapmakers. Today, I'm publishing a modern take on this map, built with the geospatial tools I've been developing over the past decade. Interact with the map here: walker-data.com/maps/census-...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

New post: how to visualize millions of parcels on a map. Learn how I go from 14.3 million Texas parcel records in a 7GB geodatabase to a published interactive map. Featuring tools like DuckDB, PMTiles, R, and Cloudflare R2. Read it here: walker-data.com/posts/millio...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Mapped: % of US-born adults, by PUMA (~100k-200k people), born in their current state of residence. Lots to unpack in this one. Explore the interactive map: walker-data.com/maps/born-in... For those so inclined, the source code is here: gist.github.com/walkerke/875...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Identifying possible gas-flare operators from satellite heat signals. Mapping persistent NASA VIIRS thermal detections across Texas, then matching the strongest candidates to nearby on-schedule RRC wells and their operators.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

I'm excited to share that I've received a grant from R Consortium to modernize R's tigris and tidycensus packages this summer. Over the past decade, tigris and tidycensus have become fixtures in R's demographic and spatial data ecosystems.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Understanding site accessibility by time-of-day is critical for emergency services, supply chain management, retail analytics, and more. Communicate this with @mapbox.com isochrones visualized with mapgl's new slider control in R.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

mapgl 0.5.0 for R lets you sync up as many maps as your browser can handle. Shown here: 16 distinct demographic maps for the Atlanta area; interact with one, the other 15 are kept in sync. Now I'm not necessarily recommending a 16-panel map... but it's fun to see what's possible.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Vignette: optimized corridor routing over cost surfaces in R. Useful for pipeline routing, transmission line planning, trail planning, wildlife connectivity modeling, and more. walker-data.com/spopt-r/arti...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Version 0.2.0 of freestiler, a Rust-powered vector tiling engine for R and Python, has landed on CRAN and PyPI. The highlight: produce vector tiles with dynamic H3 hexagonal binning built-in. Learn how: walker-data.com/freestiler/a...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

The new slider control in R's mapgl package (v0.5.0) isn't just for time-based filtering. Give it a list of paint expressions and you can animate changes over time on your map. Example: population changes at the tract level in Florida, animated in 3D.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

A bivariate look at high-tech employment share and net migration across NUTS2 regions in Europe. Interactively mapped with R's mapgl using the new bivariate choropleth feature, now available in the package's 0.5.0 release. Credit to @milos-makes-maps.bsky.social for his inspirational examples!

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Animated, hierarchical origin-destination commute flows in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX. Downtowns, medical districts, airports, and suburban job hubs light up from 2023 LODES data. Now available in R's mapgl 0.5.0. Credit to @ekotov.pro for the implementation and @ilyabo.bsky.social for Flowmap.gl!

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

The upcoming v0.5 release of mapgl for #rstats is going to be massive. Included: a slider control that allows for interactive data filtering - no Shiny required. Thanks to @ekotov.pro - brush a window over a histogram, see your data filter in real-time Lots more examples to share this week

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Working on H3 integration into freestiler, my R/Python vector tiling tool. The new feature uses @duckdb.org internally to dynamically aggregate points into a multi-layer hexagonal tileset based on some function (summary stats, or your own custom SQL). Tiled here: 12M US groundwater wells

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

I grew up in Oregon without air conditioning, it seemed quite normal at the time, we just pulled out the box fans when it got hot in the summer. Fascinating to explore the patterns in this new Census data - lots of areas around Oregon / the US where AC prevalence isn't as high as you might expect.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Mapped: the % of occupied housing units without air conditioning by Census tract. Uses the new U.S. Census Bureau LACE dataset. Map the data yourselves: gist.github.com/walkerke/71e...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

- A single-year-of-age profile chart comparing 2000, 2010, and 2020 decennial distributions, with tips on making these for all US states in parallel; - Animating drive-time areas in DC by time-of-day and traffic patterns.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

- A 3D swipe map comparing population density in Dallas-Fort Worth between 2010 and 2020; - A "story map" of Canadian cities with 3D buildings and weather effects;

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

146 million US jobs. Visualized by sector on a fast, filterable interactive map. Fly from market to market smoothly with @maptiler.bsky.social's geocoder. Explore for yourselves: walker-data.com/freestiler/l...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

One of my favorite features in R's mapgl package: create custom, branded pop-ups for your interactive maps. Build a map template then use your AI agent to craft a pop-up that looks just the way you want. Learn how - workshops go away for good on Friday: walkerdata.gumroad.com/l/all-worksh...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

The largest cities by area in the US that are not consolidated city-counties are: 1. Houston 2. Oklahoma City 3. Phoenix 4. San Antonio Here's NYC (inclusive of interior water) super-imposed over all four. Explore city sizes with my tool: walker-data.com/maps...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

City boundaries in the US can be strange. I built a tool to help you explore and compare them. Choose a city, drag it around the map, compare with other cities in the US. Try it out: walker-data.com/maps/city-co...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

I love living in Fort Worth. And I think it's cool that we're now the 10th largest city by population in the US. But it's important to put this into context.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

An interactive legend color picker is coming to the next release of R's mapgl package. Specify a list of color ramp functions when you generate your palette for mapping; your data will automatically re-style with no need for Shiny. Learn more: walker-data.com/mapgl/articl...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Lots of new features landing in R's mapgl package as it approaches an 0.5.0 release. Today's drop: - An interactive color ramp picker for your legends - Native bivariate choropleth mapping Learn more: walker-data.com/mapg...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Not "flashy" for social media, but some useful quality-of-life features have landed in the development version of R's mapgl package: - Bezier curves and Bezier polygons in the draw control; - A coordinates control to track your mouse position (decimal or DMS);

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

spopt, an R package for spatial optimization, is now in general release on CRAN. spopt-r is inspired by the Python package of the same name. Features include: - Regionalization algorithms for building contiguous districts / territories; - Facility location solvers;

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Putting Codex 5.5 through its paces today. Some really cool (and useful) features, like interactive attribute editing, will be landing in #rstats's mapgl shortly...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Mapping healthcare jobs clusters in Texas cities. Explore and filter the data yourselves: walker-data.com/free...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Clustering is a highly effective technique for visualizing dense geospatial point data. With freestiler, you can build cluster-aware tilesets that intelligently aggregate points until you hit a desired max cluster zoom level. Shown here: visualizing 5 million points smoothly with clustering.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

146 million US jobs. Styled by category on a fast, filterable interactive map. Explore it here: walker-data.com/freestiler/l... The map is powered by {freestiler}, a Rust-powered vector tiling tool that is now available in general release on CRAN.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Visualizing a time-series of Texas mining, quarrying, and oil & gas extraction jobs (NAICS21) by Census tract between 2002 and 2023 in 3D. Featuring a native slider control for R's mapgl package, currently in development.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

A new release of the mapgl R package (0.4.6) is now on CRAN. Get your hands on some major updates: - Static map helpers for image output / inclusion in Quarto reports; - Support for categorical rasters; - The latest @Mapbox GL JS with native PMTiles support

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Facility and route optimization on road network graphs can solve countless problems across many industries. However, these solvers often require expensive software to set up and run them, or expensive, rate-limited travel-time matrix APIs. The spopt-r R package offers a solution.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

The Huff model is the classic algorithm in retail spatial analysis - and you can now use it in R. Predict: - Which store a customer is likely to visit - Sales potential per location - How new stores reshape the competitive landscape Learn more: walker-data.com/spop...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

New in spopt-r: optimized corridor routing on cost surfaces. Vignette: how to optimize a route for a produced water pipeline in Appalachia. Build a friction raster from inputs like terrain & land cover, then find the least cost path and evaluate diverse scenarios. walker-data.com/spopt-r/arti...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Just implemented: support for categorical {terra} rasters in R's mapgl. Shown here: 7.6 million 300m x 300m grid cells across Texas derived from the 2024 NLCD, running fast natively in MapLibre. Closes a 2-year-old issue - was one that was more difficult to figure out than it seemed!

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Teaching Gemma 4 (26b MoE) how to map Census data in R via OpenCode & oMLX in the Zed IDE. It's the first local LLM I've used that gets me real-time responsiveness. Running on a MacBook Pro M2 MAX, 64GB RAM. Not as smart as the frontier models - but it's running for free on my own hardware.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Can AI map land data in survey plats? Absolutely, if you set it up right. Shown here: extracting the surface hole, penetration point, and bottom hole coordinates from a permit plat PDF and plotting them with the lateral on an interactive map.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

The freestiler R / Python package has been around for a month now, and it's proving to be one of the most useful tools I've built. Vector tiles are a must for high-performance visualization of large geospatial datasets, but creating vector tiles has long been tricky without specialized expertise.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

New in the R mapgl package: static maps! I developed mapgl to bring my favorite interactive mapping libraries to R. But - interactive maps are by definition hard to share in non-interactive formats. I'm rolling out a couple new functions I'm already finding useful:

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

850,000 parcels in New York City. All visualized on an interactive map in 3D by estimated market value per square foot. Filtered dynamically in the browser with an interactive legend.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Our beloved Claude - even with access in this case to multiple years of conversations with me about mapping - defaults to a year-and-a-half-old release of MapLibre. A large percentage of people using AI uncritically are actually 18 months behind. Use this to your advantage.

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

This is why I'm so excited about my new R/Python package, {freestiler}. I connect to a 146M row @duckdb.org database; generate vector tiles for 2.8 million jobs in CO from a query; serve the tiles and visualize on a @maplibre.org map. All in seconds! Get started: walker-data.com/freestiler

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Another update to R's spopt-r package: you can specify "required" and "candidate" facilities in max coverage / location-allocation solvers Brief demo: choosing the best new fire stations from candidate points in Fort Worth Same functionality here as ArcGIS's Network Analyst

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

New in the spopt-r #rstats package: route optimization. Solve the classic Traveling Salesman Problem for a single driver or optimize a fleet by solving the Vehicle Routing Problem. Written in Rust so they solve fast. Read the vignette which covers r5r integration: walker-data.com/spop...

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Kyle Walker @kylewalker.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

All 8.1 million US Census blocks. Visualized smoothly in 3D. Instant population and housing totals from a lasso selection. All running seamlessly in the browser, no traditional backend. While everyone’s talking about AI, it’s an incredible time for geospatial tech.

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