It’s been a few months since my last post, which is not necessarily what I intended, but I took some time off at the beginning of the year before jumping into new ventures. Since then, I’ve been quite engaged coming up to speed with a new team and getting going on some data architecture challenges….
New Directions
Since the first of the year, I’ve been on my own. After considering a number of really compelling job offers, I decided to start my own company and take a contract position with company doing work that’s meaningful to me (more on that in the future). I’m also picking back up with some GIS work…
Stripe API Pagination in FME
I few weeks ago, I described an integration I built to pull data from the Stripe via its API and load it into BigQuery. There were two main problems with this approach: First, it was incredibly hacky – a Wile E. Coyote approach to the problem involving cron jobs and EC2 instances and GCS uploads…
Mission Accomplished
Today was my last day at Fulcrum. Two days before Thanksgiving, I was informed that my position was being eliminated as of December 31, 2022. I start the new year on severance. The past five weeks have been a mixture of emotions that can be summed up as “strange.” The first week or so was…
Organizational Muscle Memory
I’ve had plenty of opportunity to tell my “story” lately. After my initial post that my current position is ending, there has been a pleasantly surprising amount of interest and activity. Others have told me that I shouldn’t be surprised, but I feel like I’ve been fairly heads-down the past six years so it was…
Integrating Stripe with BigQuery
One of the projects that I mentioned in my post a couple of weeks ago was the migration of our billing system to Stripe. Stripe is widely used for billing on the internet, in both SaaS and non-SaaS use cases. A while back, I wrote about the general limitations of IPaaS platforms in terms of…
Salesforce to Jira: Using FME for Business Automation
I mentioned in my previous post that, at my current organization, we had made good use of FME in processing non-spatial business data. In this post, I’ll provide an example of that. One of the functions in my department is professional services. Our professional services team, like similar teams in many product companies, doesn’t capture…
Turning the Page
It is rare that I use my blog to explicitly blow my own horn. I prefer to write about technology, leadership, and the good works of others, but I find myself in different circumstances now. I learned this week that my current position will be eliminated as of 31 December, 2022. After that, I will…
Lessons from Maps and Old Code
Taking over someone else’s code is hard. There is probably no better look at how a person thinks than looking at their code. It can be tempting to trash their code and start from scratch. This temptation often runs into conflict with a sunk-cost fallacy that says “The previous person spent so much time on…
Reflections, Twenty-One Years On
Yesterday was the 21st anniversary of 9/11. I tend to let that day go by without comment. My recollections of the day itself add nothing as I was 50 miles outside of DC at the time. Even that far away, the roads were filled with panicked people and the phone networks were crashing, but I…