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GIS. I've been using PostGIS a ton at work in the past year, and I've read _PostGIS In Action_[1], but I've really just scratched the surface. I want to play around with making my own projections.

[1] https://www.manning.com/books/postgis-in-action-second-editi...

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Desktop GUI Gis programs like QGIS are pretty fun and there are tons of resources for learning the basics. You can download elevation raster data and highway vector data for the area around your city or somewhere more topographically interesting and start making maps or just some armchair exploring. Topography and hillshade data are gorgeous. And it's pretty easy to play around with projections, especially changing parameters on standard ones like Lambert.

Check out d3.js - building a GIS app myself on top of d3 and it's really powerful and runs in the browser. Will have to do the GIS calcs server side and just use d3 to render but that plays really well with PostGIS...

Another suggestion. Implement the R-tree.

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