This lesson was a good introduction to symbols and renderers in with the ArcGIS API. In a previous
lesson (I believe it was lesson 4) we did some basic symbology, but here we went into more detail
in creating more complex symbols, such as picture and 3D. I will say I was somewhat confused by the
billboarded versus draped discussion in the blog post. At first, I didn't appreciate the difference and
thought billboarded was just 3D but then grasped the concept of the symbol always facing the user after
I read more about visual variables and 3D symbols in the lesson.
As for the renderers section, I appreciated the additional detail provided on each renderer type and how
it is used and invoked. I did play around with rendering symbols in lesson 5 (I couldn't bring myself
to submit a map that was not somewhat aesthetically pleasing) but it was trial and error and (and Googling)
I did not fully appreciate what I was doing. This lesson helped me better understand. Additionally, for
the class breaks renderer, I appreciated using a function to simplify the code. I think this was one of
first real opportunities to write a function in JS. Additionally, I appreciated Ben's link to an ArcGIS
blog which explained autocasting more.
For the homework assignment, the most challenging part was finding REST services outside of the Esri
samples that actually worked. I was unable to get some of the services I found, such as from FEMA or
Census.gov, to pull in the data. I don't know if it was due to broken links in their data or it taking
longer time to load (either using MapImageLayer to perform functions server side or FeatureLayer to
perform on my computer). Regardless, I did find REST services from the EPA which I was able to play
with. One thing I did want to do but was unable to figure out was to decodes the FIPS info for the
service I found. I was hoping to create a look up table so a user could select a state FIPS at the
beginning of the code and then the rest of the code would automatically filter out for the state and
then decode for the county. I did find a link to a text file with all the state and counties but was
unable to write code to do this automatically. I think an easier way in the future would be to conduct
this processing in ArcGIS Online (or Pro) and then just host the feature through a webpage.
Finally, I did enjoy looking at other "IDEs". I put IDE in quotes because I discovered many that we
use are not technically IDEs, just advanced text editors. I had been using Notpad++ and SublimeText for
this course, but elected to switch to VS Code after my review due to the extensions and IDE like features
(it reminded me a lot of PyCharm).