The Cartographer’s Confession: How PostGIS Turned...

Let me start with a confession. For years, I treated geospatial data like a messy closet—shove everything in, slam the door, and pray nobody asks for a “nearby” anything. Then came the project that broke me: a real-time delivery tracker with 50k points and a naive WHERE sqrt((x1-x2)^2 + (y1-y2)^2) < 0.01 query that took forty-five seconds. My CTO’s Slack message just said: “Oof.” That night, I discovered PostGIS. And I learned that working with space on a computer isn’t just math—it’s an art for