 Hi, I'm Jim Detweiler, one of the instructors in Penn State's course, Geography 489, Advanced Python Programming for GIS. I've done a few other course welcome videos and it's tempting to let you think I'm some super prolific course author, but I should probably fess up that I'm recording this because the guys who actually did the amazing job developing this course live abroad. Jan Walgren is in Deutschland and James O'Brien comes from the Land of Wonder. This course builds on our introductory GIS programming course, GeoG45 and is intended for students who excelled in that course or who have acquired similar knowledge and skills in industry. So, what will you learn in this class? You'll learn about customizing both proprietary and open source GIS packages, ArcGIS Pro and QGIS, object-oriented programming in Python, version control systems like GitHub, improving script performance through 64-bit and parallel processing, user interface development, packaging and distributing your Python programs, and finally spatial data science programming with Jupyter Notebook and Esri's ArcGIS API for Python. And like our other programming courses, you'll have a chance to apply what you learned to a final project of your own choosing. Our hope is that this class will help you to become an expert GIS developer in your office. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me, Jan or James. We'll be happy to help.