Ryan Shields has one of the most interesting careers in geospatial — from remote sensing for conservation in the Caribbean, to disaster response data engineering with FEMA, to his current role turning spatial data into animation assets for Johnny Harris's YouTube channel at New Press.

In this episode, Ryan counts down the 10 tools he's using right now to tell map stories that reach millions of viewers. We cover Felt, PostGIS on Crunchy Bridge, Geo Layers 3 for After Effects, CShapes for historical borders, Natural Earth, MapTiler, Mapshaper, the new GDAL pipeline syntax, GRASS GIS, and how he's stitching it all together with Claude Code and VS Code.

Along the way we get into how LLMs are changing geospatial workflows, why command-line tools are well-suited to AI agents, the limits of de facto vs de jure borders in historical datasets, and how better tooling is making data journalism viable for small communities that newsrooms usually overlook.

Whether you're a cartographer, data engineer, journalist, or just map-curious, this one is packed with links worth chasing.

Tools & resources mentioned in this episode

Felt — https://felt.com
PostGIS — https://postgis.net
Crunchy Bridge — https://www.crunchybridge.com
Geo Layers 3 (After Effects extension) — https://aescripts.com/geolayers/ ⚠️ verify
CShapes (historical borders dataset) — https://icr.ethz.ch/data/cshapes/ ⚠️ verify
Open Historical Map — https://www.openhistoricalmap.org
Natural Earth — https://www.naturalearthdata.com
Eduard (Swiss-style hillshading app) — https://www.eduard.earth ⚠️ verify
Shaded Relief (Tom Patterson) — https://www.shadedrelief.com
MapTiler — https://www.maptiler.com
MapTiler Engine — https://www.maptiler.com/engine/
EPSG.io — https://epsg.io
Mapshaper — https://mapshaper.org
GDAL — https://gdal.org
GRASS GIS — https://grass.osgeo.org
QGIS — https://qgis.org
DBeaver — https://dbeaver.io
Claude Code — https://claude.com/claude-code ⚠️ verify
VS Code — https://code.visualstudio.com
Geodata Viewer (VS Code extension) — search "Geodata Viewer" in the VS Code marketplace
PAI – Personal AI Infrastructure (Daniel Miessler) — https://github.com/danielmiessler ⚠️ verify exact repo
Deep State Map (Ukraine conflict) — https://deepstatemap.live
Johnny Harris (YouTube) — https://www.youtube.com/@johnnyharris

Projects I'm working on

Quick Map Tools — https://quickmaptools.com
Hunting NZ — https://huntingnz.com
NZ Elevation Tools — https://nzelevationtools.com
Smart Query Tools — https://smartquerytools.com