Michell's GIS Journey

Hi, I'm Michell! I was born and raised in Venezuela and moved to Orlando, FL a couple of years ago. I've always had a strong interest in geographic studies, especially after taking two years of Geodesic Engineering courses back home. One of my professors encouraged me to pursue GIS, but unfortunately, the college I attended didn’t offer GIS courses at the time. It’s been a while since then, but I’ve finally had the opportunity to follow that path. I’m currently on my fourth course toward earning a GIS certificate. I work full time at Disney, and I’m also a part-time student working toward my Associate in Arts degree. I would describe myself as motivated, curious, and always eager to learn something new. GIS has been a fascinating journey so far, and I’m looking forward to continuing to grow in this field. Here is the link to my StoryMap: My Favorite Places

 This week’s assignment in GIS Programming focused on extracting detailed geometry information from a shapefile and writing it to a plain text file using Python and ArcPy. The objective was to loop through a shapefile called rivers.shp, extract each feature’s object ID, name, and every individual vertex coordinate (X, Y), then write that data into a structured .txt file. We began by setting up our script environment; importing arcpy, enabling overwrite output, and setting the workspace to the Module 6 data folder. From there, we created a search cursor that accessed the OID, SHAPE geometry object, and river name for each feature. Then, we opened a .txt file. One key learning moment was understanding how to use SHAPE@ instead of SHAPE@XY. The SHAPE@ token gives us full access to the geometry object, which allowed us to use the .getPart() method to loop through each point (or vertex) that defines the shape of the river features. Inside a nested loop, we tracked each vertex using a si...

This week's assignment focused on automating geoprocessing tasks. The goal was to write a script that created a new file geodatabase, copied all shapefiles from a data folder into it, and then searched for a New Mexico "county seat" cities to build a dictionary of city names and populations. The script walked through a series of tasks: Set the workspace and import modules; Created a file geodatabase in a Results folder using the student account name; Listed all feature classes in the Data folder; Copied those shapefiles into the new geodatabase; Used a Search Cursor to pull out the fields needed; Built a dictionary mapping city names to population values; Printed the final dictionary, displaying all the results. The hardest part for me was step 4: Copying feature classes into the geodatabase. While copying shapefiles to the new geodatabase, I wasn’t initially getting the elapsed time message for each shapefile. This was because I was calling the function outside the loop....

  This week’s assignment focused on using ArcPy scripting in ArcGIS Notebooks to perform a series of spatial processing tasks. We worked with a shapefile of hospitals and carried out three main operations: adding XY coordinates , creating 1000-meter buffers , and dissolving those buffers into a single unified shape. The goal was to take a shapefile of hospital locations and prepare it for spatial analysis. By the end of the process, we’d have a single polygon representing the full coverage area of all hospitals in the dataset. One small issue I ran into was a typo ( workplace instead of workspace ), but it reminded me to carefully check tool syntax.  This assignment helped me build confidence in using ArcPy for geoprocessing , and it showed how Python can automate tasks that would take much longer if done manually. 

  This week's assignment was to modify, correct and fix errors in 3 different scripts. It really helped me strengthen both my Python skills and my understanding of working with GIS layers. This assignment not only improved my Python scripting for GIS, but also taught me the importance of structured error handling, code readability and visual planning.  Script 1: Script 2: Script 3: In this script, we were to add a try-except statement to the script, to do so, I wrapped part A and B in its own try block. Inside the except block, the print statement displays a clear error without stopping the entire script. This ensures that even if one part fails, the script continues running and reports the issue. I am also adding a flowchart of this third script: