(Yes, this 2023 YouTube video is still smarter than half your LinkedIn feed in 2025)
By now you’ve probably seen every GIS tutorial this side of TikTok. Explainers in Comic Sans, videos with clickbait titles like “10 Secrets ArcGIS Pros Don’t Want You to Know.” Nonsense. Empty calories. Data visualized, yes. Brain cells? Not so much.
Then there’s this gem from 2023—two years old, practically Jurassic by internet standards. But don’t worry, it’s not obsolete. Unlike some of our elected officials, it still works.
It’s a video by Modern GIS (Spatial Lab), and it’s called:
“How I Would Learn GIS If I Had to Start Over.”
Let me spoil it for you: it’s practical, honest, and doesn’t make you feel stupid for not knowing what a CRS is. (That’s Coordinate Reference System, not another government acronym designed to confuse.)
Step 1: Start With a Problem
No, not your existential one. A real-world, spatial one.
The speaker—let’s call him Matt because that’s his name—says: Find a reason to use GIS. Solve something that actually matters to you. Not “learn every toolbar in ArcMap.” Not “watch five tutorials and pretend you’re a GIS analyst.” No. Pick a damn problem and work backward.
You want to map flood zones in your grandmother’s barangay? Good. That’s GIS. You want to overlay Starbucks locations over earthquake fault lines to prove frappuccinos defy seismic logic? Even better. The point is: GIS starts with a question, not a certificate.
Step 2: Learn the Basics (No, Really)
- CRS. Not your ex’s initials.
- Vector vs. Raster. One’s like a spreadsheet; the other’s like an angry JPEG.
- Shapefiles. They’re old. They break. But they’re everywhere. Like expired politicians.
You want to impress someone? Learn how to reproject data and explain it without sounding like a math teacher who hates kids. Bonus points if your layers actually line up.
Step 3: Pick a Tool. Marry It.
Stop speed-dating software. Matt says: Pick one tool and master it. Preferably QGIS (free, open-source, and doesn’t randomly crash when Mercury is in retrograde). Or ArcGIS Pro if you like suffering in style and have institutional budget approval from someone who doesn’t know what they signed.
You do not need to learn PostGIS, Python, GDAL, R, and build a web map before you can make a point map. You just need to make a map.
Step 4: Make Something Ugly
Make a map. It’ll suck. That’s fine. The first pancake is always burnt.
What matters is: do it anyway. Grab data. Clean it. Cry. Map it. Cry again. Try again.
Your first project shouldn’t be “Building a Climate Risk Model Using Remote Sensing and Deep Learning.” Try “Mapping Trees on My Street Without Screwing Up the Scale Bar.”
Step 5: Join a Community
Don’t learn GIS like a hermit with Wi-Fi.
Find people. GIS folks are weird, generous, and slightly obsessive. Perfect. Join a QGIS forum. Post your broken map. Get roasted. Learn. Repeat.
Pro tip: Avoid anyone who calls themselves a “Mapfluencer.” No one who uses that term has ever touched GDAL.
Step 6: Layer in Complexity
Once you’ve learned to walk, then you can start crawling through terminal windows.
| Level | What You Add | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | PostGIS | Because spatial SQL is the broccoli of GIS |
| Level 2 | Python & GDAL | For automating the stuff you hate repeating |
| Level 3 | Web mapping | So your map lives online, not just in your screenshots folder |
| Level 4 | Cartography | To stop using that awful red-green color ramp |
Step 7: Make It Reproducible
Version control. Git. Folders that aren’t named “New Folder (8).” Think of your future self. They will hate you if you don’t start labeling your files properly.
And stop storing things in “Downloads.” GIS is already hard enough.
Step 8: Teach What You Just Learned 30 Seconds Ago
Write it. Blog it. Post it. Explain it to someone else. Not because you’re a guru. But because you’ll forget next week.
Matt says to share knowledge. I say: show your work like it’s a crime scene—document everything. In GIS, there’s no such thing as overexplaining. Only lost metadata.
In Conclusion: The Video’s Still Relevant. You? Hopefully.
Yes, the video is from 2023. So what? GIS tools change, but the thinking hasn’t. And that’s the beauty of it.
It’s still about solving spatial problems, not flexing Python one-liners on StackOverflow. It’s about clarity, not clickbait. And it’s about usefulness, not trendiness.
Learn GIS. Not because it’s trendy. But because maps don’t lie—people do.