GEO Business returns to Excel London on 3–4 June, spotlighting the people and technologies using geospatial data to tackle real-world challenges. Joining this year’s speaker line-up is Dennis Bauszus, Principle Software Engineer at Geolytix.
What’s one thing you wish more organisations understood about using location intelligence in real projects?
Data aggregation, abstraction, and arbitrary scale. Most data is heavily processed. Popular drivetime catchments are probabilities and are best used in direct site comparisons.
Site A is probably better suited than Site B rather than expecting a given minimum number of clients to live within a store’s calculated catchment.
Location intelligence is the spatial extension of business intelligence. We must take particular care with cartographic data representation, which can be misleading. Sometimes this is by design.
You're big on mentoring and developer experience. What's the one thing you wish someone had told you earlier in your career?
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Most issues have already been solved in the Open Source world. Be conscious of good documentation.
Tutorials should not be an afterthought. Try to research an issue before asking a question and be appreciative of a maintainer’s time which is often unpaid. And most importantly, don’t throw good time after bad time.
If you get stuck on a problem that leads to another problem and then another (elephants all the way down), it is better to step back and evaluate the general approach. Do not be afraid to delete your legacy code and technical debt to start with a fresh mindset and different tooling.
What do you want visitors to take away from your session at GEO Business 2026?
Apart from map interfaces, Spatial isn’t particularly special. Data transfer, access security, feature permissions, and visualisation are common software engineering issues.
Why is an event like GEO Business so important for the industry right now?
The shift to web interfaces and remote work has siloed us since the COVID pandemic. Since many of my team members are abroad and I need a quiet environment I hardly visit the office.
Products are built for product managers, not for users. Business success determines a product’s success. Hence it is valuable for us engineers to gain better insight into business leaders’ outlook on our industry.
About Dennis
An experienced engineer in the Location Intelligence sector, Dennis started his professional career as a land surveyor for a local government in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. After relocating to London in the noughties he became a GIS professional and graduate geographer.
As a fellow of the OSGeo community Dennis likes to promote free and open source software for geography (FOSS4G).While skilled in geodesy, cartography, geomatics, and all things considered mapping, his day-to-day job is software engineering with a particular concern for community, mentoring, technical documentation, and developer experience.
💡 Hear Dennis speak at GEO Business 2026.
📆 3 June | Data Analytics & AI Stage | 13:30-14:00