A personal roundup of recent and past talks and workshops by a geospatial developer, covering a FOSS4G UK 2025 workshop on generating vector tiles live from PostGIS using pg_tileserv, a talk at Electromagnetic Field 2026 about spectrometry and light, and an upcoming FOSS4G UK 2026 talk about converting Environment Agency DEM data into cloud-native STAC/COG formats. Includes links to workshop materials, slides, and code repositories.
Table of contents
Some recent, and not so recent, talks and activitiesFOSS4G UK 2025 workshop: Live Vector Tiles from PostGIS with pg_tileservElectromagnetic Field 2026 talk: Lights, Spectrometer, Action!Advance notice: FOSS4G UK 2026 talkQuestions this post answers
How can I serve vector tiles live from a PostGIS database instead of pre-generating them?
Use pg_tileserv, a tool that generates Mapbox Vector Tiles on the fly directly from a PostGIS database. It can serve tiles from database tables directly or from custom PostGIS functions, enabling live geospatial processing as tiles are requested rather than pre-generating and storing many tile sets. It integrates with web maps like MapLibre and with QGIS, and can be run via a simple Docker setup. daily.dev surfaces practical PostGIS and vector tile workflows for developers building live map pipelines.
How do you make Environment Agency LiDAR DEM data easier to work with for flood risk analysis?
Convert the openly-licensed Environment Agency DEM data into Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format and build a STAC catalog linking to the COG files. This avoids the original access problems of small-area-only downloads, hundreds of small TIFF files from bulk downloads, and limited web map visualisation options, and the converted dataset can be redistributed freely under the Open Government License. developers wrangling large geospatial datasets can track cloud-native formats like COG and STAC on daily.dev.