About

I’m Mike Baran, and I live in Edmonton. I make maps that move.

Most open data is published as a snapshot: a table of 311 tickets, a folder of aerial photos, a river gauge’s daily readings. But the interesting part is nearly always the change. When do the roads break? Which parking lots became buildings? How fast is a burned town coming back? I build the pipeline that turns those snapshots into a sequence, and then I spend far too long on the colours.

How I work

Everything here starts from open data: City of Edmonton and Government of Alberta portals, Environment and Climate Change Canada, NASA and Copernicus satellites, and OpenStreetMap. Every project lists its sources and their licences. I write the processing in Python, mostly GeoPandas, Rasterio and NumPy. I lean on GeoAI models like SAM and building detectors where they actually help, and I render the frames myself with Matplotlib and ffmpeg.

I try to check my maps against the world. That means official records where they exist, ground truth when I can get it, and the news when a satellite shows something I can’t explain. Each write-up ends with its caveats, because a map that hides its limits isn’t worth much.

Edmonton and safe mobility

I keep coming back to how Edmonton is built for moving around in: speed limits, road condition, parking, and how much of the city is given over to cars. I’m always glad to talk with anyone working on safer streets.