Bill Dollins

Organizational Muscle Memory

by

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 … Read more

Integrating Stripe with BigQuery

by

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 flexibility and Stripe exposes a lot of these.

One particular product did not expose all of the object type we needed to extract from Stripe. Another simply did not sync all of the object types it claimed to be syncing. A third had a clear bug in which it wrote the current date/time into all date fields. In each of these cases, we were left to file support tickets and wait. I moved on.

Read more

Salesforce to Jira: Using FME for Business Automation

by

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 its own work. It is dependent on our sales team to capture work and communicate when the deal has closed so work can begin. As we grew, and as we switched to fully remote during the pandemic, this communication often lagged, resulting in delays in starting work that had previously closed. We chose to tackle this problem with automation.

Read more

Turning the Page

by

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 be available for my next role. Until then, I am actively looking in addition to winding things down where I am now.

Regarding my next role, I have taken nothing off the table. I am open to consulting engagements or full-time positions. I am also considering starting my own company, which would be a consulting firm with the intent to grow rather than remaining a one-person outfit. I am writing this post because LinkedIn profiles and one-page CVs rarely paint a complete picture, so this is a companion piece that is intended to fill in the gaps.

I have been in my current position for nearly six years. Given the size of the company, it has been a mix of leadership and hands-on technical work. Since we have always been eyeing growth, I skewed toward leadership, because it is important for a company to avoid single-threading functions through individual people as much as possible.

Read more

Lessons from Maps and Old Code

by

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 this that they had to understand the problem far better than me and maybe my time would be best spent learning from their code.” The really tough part about this is that it’s not always a fallacy.

My own encounter with this dilemma came early in my career – early enough that the code in question was written in AML. The company I worked for at the time had just transferred me to the offices of a large water utility to take over the development of their cartographic production system from a developer who had recently moved on. I had never met this developer and he was already gone, so I only had his code to work from.

Read more

Reflections, Twenty-One Years On

by

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 wasn’t in the city and I have nothing to add about that day.

Twenty-one years ago today, I was driving back home with my family and, as we crossed the Harry Nice Bridge from Virginia back into Maryland, it was flanked on either side by armed boats from local law enforcement and the National Guard. At that time, I was a contractor supporting an infrastructure protection program for the Department of Defense. There was no clearer illustration of the importance of what we did than those boats on that day.

Read more

100 Days

by

Tomorrow will officially end my streak of 100 consecutive days of running at least one mile per day. Most days, I’ve tried to make it at least three, but there have been a few “streak savers” in there. The most memorable one is when I ran a mile circling our parking bay during a thunderstorm in Florida. There have been a few trips that have caused me to dash to a treadmill to get in a mile before the stroke of midnight, but I’ve generally met my goal of not relying on one-mile days too often.

Every year, Runner’s World does the #RWRunStreak event where you run each day between Memorial Day and Independence Day (both US). That amounts to 36 days or so. I did this event with some co-workers a few years ago and I didn’t love it. I was already training for my first marathon and I found that the streak interfered with my training plan.

Read more

QGIS and a Small Passion Project

by

When he was in the Air Force, my father served on Air Force One under four presidents – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He was on the engine crew and got to see a lot of the world over the course of those administrations. I grew up with Presidential memorabilia all through our home: signed photos of the presidential plane, commemorative holiday pictures from the White House, and Christmas ornaments, for example. Occasionally, I’d run across fun things like his old passport with stamps from countries who have not been friendly with the US in decades – hints of a bygone geopolitical era. One time, I found four sets of gold-rimmed Ray-Ban aviator glasses that had been standard issue for a few years – especially for those who spent long days on tarmacs.

Recently, he pulled out a memento I had never seen, pictured at the top of this post. It was box that was given to personnel who accompanied Eisenhower on a trip through Europe, Asia, and Africa in 1959. The box was full of other mementos, including a deck of cards from the Columbine, the propellor-driven predecessor to the Boeing jets that have been flown for several decades now. Also a Zippo lighter still polished to a high sheen. But what fascinated me was the map on the cover. I took a picture of it and came home intent on recreating it with GIS.

Read more

Services, Solutions, and Products

by

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 integrators of all sizes. Most of the time, attempts to do this never get past the whiteboard stage and those that do invariably fail to become anything the wider technology market would recognize as a product.

In my current role, I happen to work for a company that actually succeeded in turning a solution it built to support its original services-based business into a thriving software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. While this represents an anecdotal and statistically-insignificant sample of one, it has helped me understand the differences between successful products and those solutions that never quite get there. I also happen to manage the portfolio of SaaS platforms my company uses for its own operations, so I’ve had a good chance to observe commonalities among many products and contrast them with the solutions in the previous phase of my career.

Read more

Give Me a Standard, Any Standard

by

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 find myself missing the influence of OGC on the geospatial technology community.

I’ve spent the last year working on integrating several SaaS systems, including Stripe, Salesforce, NetSuite, and others. I’ve touched upon this in previous posts. All of them implement some form of REST API, but fostering interoperability doesn’t seem to be a primary purpose of those APIs as much as is the enablement of a proprietary partner/strategic-alliance ecosystem. As a result, these APIs, while generally well-documented, are essentially arbitrary. They implement the HTTPS+JSON pattern in the same way that many written languages implement the Roman alphabet. I can sound out the words, but I don’t really have any idea what I’m saying.

Read more