A geospatial career journey
I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. They are usually motivated by well-intentioned, but often misguided, factors and are typically designed to fail. That said, the annual passage of January 1 is a good milestone for assessing goals for the coming year. A lot of the work winds down between mid-December and January … Continue reading Simpler Goals
Happy New Year! Welcome to 2024! It's been a few years since I've done one of these, but I've been posting more actively in recent months, which has attracted attention from sales and marketing types. Blogging in 2024 is different than it was in 2006, for sure. This is the geoMusings blog. It represents by … Continue reading Station Identification 2024
I was having a conversation a few weeks ago, discussing, among other things, the value of time - its management, its conservation, how it is the one strategic asset that matters above all others. During that part of the conversation, it occurred to me that if time is the asset, then people and relationships are … Continue reading The One About Friends
I've been integrating pg_webhooks into some project work lately. Conversely, I have not been using n8n much, but a vendor rep used it in a demo of some workflow automation capabilities for a platform one of my customers is using. I had dabbled with it about two years ago but haven't done much with it … Continue reading Using pg_webhooks with n8n – A Simple Example
This question comes up more frequently than I would expect. I've been writing here since 2006 and this blog is a good map of my professional journey over that time. Most often, when people ask me the titular question, they are wondering how I can keep this up for so long. Less frequently, the question … Continue reading How Do I Write?
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa Jimmy Buffet, "Fruitcakes," 1994 I hate writing tests. With the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. Tests are good and necessary for quality software. Automating tests is the core of any CI/CD pipeline worthy of the name. I am well-versed in the value of tests and testing. I … Continue reading A Grudging Thanks to Tests
FOSS4G North America was an opportunity for me to reconnect with both community and technology. I enjoyed being able to both learn new things and refresh my skills with technologies such as PostGIS. I was reflecting on how, a couple weeks prior to the conference, I introduced the concept of PostgreSQL window functions to a … Continue reading Window Functions and PostGIS
I completed the Marine Corps Marathon (MCM) yesterday. This was my third time running it. It wasn’t my greatest performance, primarily due to heat and humidity. By mile 14, I was feeling really bad and went into active recovery mode. After a couple of miles, I had recovered enough to pick up intervals again and … Continue reading Medal Monday
FOSS4G North America (FOSS4GNA) wrapped up yesterday, closing out with another thought-provoking keynote by Paul Ramsey. Paul’s talks on the “economics of open source” have evolved over the years and, while this talk certainly discussed such economics, it was so much more. Paul is one of the best speakers you will see and his talks … Continue reading Initial Thoughts on FOSS4G North America
One of the first tasks I ever had in my then-new GIS career was doing AML development in ARC/INFO 6.x for a data production project. My code parsed DXF exported from AutoCAD R11 for DOS and then assigned attributes based on things like layer, color, line weight, feature type, and others. It also georeferenced the … Continue reading Data Over Software