A geospatial career journey
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 … Continue reading Stripe API Pagination in FME
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 … Continue reading Mission Accomplished
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 … Continue reading Organizational Muscle Memory
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 … Continue reading Integrating Stripe with BigQuery
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 … Continue reading Salesforce to Jira: Using FME for Business Automation
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 … Continue reading Turning the Page
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 … Continue reading Lessons from Maps and Old Code
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 … Continue reading Reflections, Twenty-One Years On
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 … Continue reading 100 Days
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 … Continue reading QGIS and a Small Passion Project