"Every developer has that one project that started as a personal solution and unexpectedly found a life of its own. For me, that was FastKML, a library I built in 2012 to "scratch my own itch." I needed to embed maps into a website, and at the time, KML was the de facto standard for visualizing geospatial data on the web. GeoJSON existed but was still in its infancy and unsupported by OpenLayers, which was then the best tool for embedding maps."
"As FastKML evolved, it depended on Shapely for geometry handling, an excellent library, but one that required C extensions and added installation complexity. That led to the birth of PyGeoIf, a pure Python implementation of basic geospatial objects. PyGeoIf aimed to serve as a lightweight, dependency-free substitute for Shapely when users didn't need all of its advanced geometry operations. The API mirrored Shapely's closely, making migration as simple as replacing"
FastKML originated in 2012 to embed maps using KML when GeoJSON support and OpenLayers compatibility were limited. FastKML prioritized performance by using lxml rather than slower XML DOM implementations. The project depended on Shapely for geometry, which introduced C-extension installation complexity. PyGeoIf was created as a pure-Python, dependency-free implementation of basic geospatial objects with an API closely mirroring Shapely for easy migration. Both projects accumulated technical debt: Python 2/3 compatibility hacks, missing type hints, and ambiguous function signatures. Test coverage remained high and usage persisted even as the ecosystem evolved by 2020.
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