Prior to my current role, I spent 25 years working in the federal contracting space. Almost all technology built in that world is one-off and designed for the specific needs of a customer. Often, those needs are complex and meeting them involves creating new technology. “Productizing” a solution is common trope around the Beltway among…
Give Me a Standard, Any Standard
I’ve spent the last year or so doing very little with geospatial technology, but I find myself missing it tremendously. Of course “in my blood” and “how I’m wired” and similar aphorisms apply to how I’m feeling, but that’s not what really has me missing geospatial. In a shocking (for me) turn of events, I…
Simple Isochrone Analysis in QGIS
With my MBA program behind me, one of my goals has been to shake the rust off my coding and GIS skills. For this post, I thought I would start simply, just to make sure I remembered how to find my way around QGIS. We recently purchased a plug-in hybrid. It has a 17-mile range…
Life and How to Live It
I finished my MBA work this week. Grades won’t post until next week, which means my completion won’t be finalized until next month sometime, but I am done. Approximately 18 months of graduate level work done all online, mostly during a pandemic, has come to an end. I have learned a lot that I will…
Geography Matters Less
For a long time now, I have tried to take a holistic approach to my day. I long ago seized upon the idea that time is the primary resource to manage and that all others, including money, are secondary. Show me a person who says “Time is money” and I will show you someone who…
Vignettes From a Month
16 hours in Denver and a drive-by catch-up with some of the geo-people I miss so much. Reminding myself that my anger might make me feel better in the short term, but it’s not worth the wreckage I’d leave in my wake. Taking down a poster for an old sales campaign at HQ from the…
A Programming Life
To say that programming saved my life would be overly dramatic. Given that I started programming at an age where most of us are prone to drama based on the ebbs and flows of hormones, a dramatic reading of my first forays into programming would be forgivable. But, while programming didn’t save my life, it…
In Praise of Process
“Ops” is all the rage these days – DevOps, RevOps, FinOps, PeopleOps. I’m surprised I haven’t seen a mention of “GeoOps” yet, given the propensity of our corner of the world to attach the “geo” prefix to what ever the current hotness may be. “Ops” is, of course, short for “operations” and “operations” is a…
SaaS, IPaaS, and Interoperability
I started this blog back in 2006 during a time when I wasn’t doing much geospatial work at all. I was working on building a human resources system for a federal government customer who was falling under the then-new and now-defunct National Security Personnel System. Because it was new and sufficiently different from the GS…
On Meetings
Since everyone works from home now, I hear a lot of the same complaint about the proliferation of online meetings. A lot of people I know seem to have their calendars overwhelmed by one kind of meeting or another. This situation is invariably described as preventing them from getting work done. Let’s be clear about…