Geospatial SWE & DevOps Standards

Purpose: code produced as part of geospatial work should run in the user's real environment and meet peer-level engineering quality. Apply these rules only when code or repository artifacts are in scope.

1. Environment realities (the top error source)

• Script-first by default: no %matplotlib inline, !pip install, or display() unless the user is explicitly in a notebook. Every file runs from a terminal via python script.py behind an if __name__ == "__main__": block. (Cell markers like # %% are fine as an addition — the script must also work without them.)
• Cross-platform paths: always pathlib.Path; never string-concatenate or hardcode / or \\. Ask or detect the user's OS before giving shell commands; give CMD/PowerShell syntax on Windows, POSIX elsewhere — don't mix (export vs set, venv/bin/activate vs venv\Scripts\activate).
• Encodings: explicit encoding="utf-8" on every text file open — Windows still defaults to legacy code pages, and non-ASCII content corrupts silently.
• Modern Python (3.11+): X | None unions, type aliases, structural pattern matching where they clarify; state the minimum version if a feature requires it.

2. Code quality defaults

Applied to every generated function/module, even when not asked:

def compute_share(values: list[float], total: float) -> list[float]:
    """Return each value's share of the total.

    Args:
        values: Values to compute shares for.
        total: Denominator; must be non-zero.

    Returns:
        Shares in the same order as values.

    Raises:
        ValueError: If total is zero.
    """
    if total == 0:
        raise ValueError("total must be non-zero — share is undefined.")
    return [v / total for v in values]

• Type hints on every signature; dataclass/TypeAlias for complex types.
• Google-style docstrings; one-liners suffice for trivial functions.
• Never bare except:; catch specific exceptions, handle or re-raise with raise ... from e. A silent pass costs a week of debugging.
• logging over print (leveled, formatted), except user-facing CLI output.
• Note algorithmic complexity where it matters ("this is O(n log n), safe at n>10⁶") — especially around nested loops and pandas apply.
• Magic numbers → named module-level constants.

3. Testing and verification

• Offer at least a skeleton pytest for every function carrying real logic:

# test_compute.py — run: python -m pytest -q
import pytest
from compute import compute_share

def test_basic() -> None:
    assert compute_share([1, 1], 2) == [0.5, 0.5]

def test_zero_total_raises() -> None:
    with pytest.raises(ValueError):
        compute_share([1.0], 0)

• Numerical code: test edge cases — empty input, NaN, negatives, single element.
• Run generated code yourself when an execution environment exists; otherwise mark it explicitly "not executed" — no silent assumptions.

4. Dependencies and reproducibility

• New project → virtual environment + pinned requirements.txt (package==version); never "install the latest".
• Seed randomness and put the seed in config (details in ml-experiment-standards).
• Note environment-difference risks where relevant (BLAS, CUDA, locale).

5. Git practices

• Conventional Commits: feat(scope): ..., fix: ..., refactor: ...; the body explains why — the diff already shows what.
• Commit in meaningful units; warn against 500-line single commits.
• Default .gitignore: venv/, __pycache__/, *.pyc, large data files (suggest DVC/LFS), IDE folders.

6. Automation / DevOps

• CI: minimal GitHub Actions for test + lint (ruff); note OS-runner differences if jobs must run on Windows too.
• Docker: start from python:3.12-slim, simple single-stage until size/caching demands more; note image size and build-cache implications.
• Monitoring: any long-lived service/pipeline ships three signals minimum: structured logs, failure alerting, basic metrics (duration, volume). ML services add drift checks (see ml-experiment-standards).
• Scheduled jobs: match the user's platform — cron on POSIX, Task Scheduler (schtasks) on Windows.

7. Code review mode

Review in this order and report findings by severity: correctness (edge cases, silent failures) → security (injection, secrets, path traversal) → performance (N+1, needless copies, O(n²)) → readability. Every finding ships with the suggested fix as code — never "this is bad" and nothing else.

Execution contract

• Workflow: clarify the geospatial code's contract; reproduce the environment; inspect correctness and data invariants; implement the smallest safe change; test; package; document operations and rollback.
• Decision rules: apply this skill to geospatial software and pipeline delivery, not generic non-spatial coding; scale CI, containers, and observability to the actual deployment risk.
• Verification protocol: run focused and regression tests, lint and type checks where configured, exercise CRS/nodata/geometry edge cases, verify clean installation, and review CI artifacts.
• Failure modes: block release for silent data loss, nondeterminism, mutable hidden state, unpinned critical dependencies, secrets, platform assumptions, missing rollback, or unhandled spatial edge cases.
• Deliverables: reviewed code, tests, reproducible environment and lock data, CI configuration, operational notes, risk-ranked findings, observability plan, and rollback instructions.
• Source freshness: consult the authoritative source registry before applying packaging, CI, testing, or supply-chain guidance.