A geospatial career journey
I was participating in a Clubhouse discussion today when someone asked the about the distinction between GIS and geospatial. Since Clubhouse is audio-only, I am paraphrasing by contribution to that particular discussion here. I think the boundaries and definitions of these concepts are pretty blurry and I am reticent to create hard distinctions between them. … Continue reading Geography, Geospatial, and GIS
The year 2021 ends tomorrow. Like many, I started the year with great hope as vaccines were around the corner. I never expected them to be a miracle cure that would make the pandemic go poof, but I hoped that people would get them in quantities that would put it in check. To say I … Continue reading So Long, 2021
I'm a CIO. That means a typical day can involve a range of activities: responding to data calls for security audits, reviewing SOC2 reports of prospective platform vendors, managing subscriptions of existing vendors, handling GDPR requests, ensuring data from corporate systems is meaningful and relevant for our internal stakeholders, attending meetings of various sorts. Somewhere … Continue reading Reconsidering the Spreadsheet
Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on Clubhouse, hosted by Todd Barr and Jordan Cullen, and including Will Cadell of SparkGeo. Clubhouse seems to be a really convenient venue for setting up such a forum with low barriers to entry, so that was enjoyable. The topic of the discussion … Continue reading Return on Non-Investment
As I continued my experimentation with BigQuery, I found myself wanting to more easily use it with my regular GIS tool set. BigQuery has a lot of powerful analytic capability, but the SQL console is intimidating for the casual user and the GeoViewer tool is fairly limited. As I began digging deeper in my previous … Continue reading BigQuery and Koop
This post is a continuation of last month's post about analyzing location change with BigQuery. At the end of that post, I was already thinking of ways to extend the analysis and visualization. I decided to take the opportunity to explore Esri's recently-announced ArcGIS Platform APIs. These APIs are the same that have been available … Continue reading Routing with BigQuery and ArcGIS Platform APIs
Following up on my previous post, I decided to attempt the same analysis in PostgreSQL. The analysis doesn't make use of any spatial logic itself (yet), but I consider this a PostGIS post because it is using PostGIS geometries. In the past, I have noticed that BigQuery SQL is very reminiscent of that of PostgreSQL, … Continue reading Analyzing Location Change Over Time in PostGIS
I've recently spent a lot of time doing various forms of business analytics in BigQuery. As discussed in a previous post, I've been using BigQuery as the data integration environment for several business systems. I've found integration at the data level via an ETL/ELT/IPaaS pipeline to be a lot more stable than system-level integrations that … Continue reading Analyzing Location Change Over Time in BigQuery
I've been paying more attention to my morning and evening routines the past few months. This started as a outgrowth of my focus on fitness, but has since expanded. Originally, I set out to block out time during my day to ensure that I had time for fitness activities. This usually shows up as an … Continue reading Mornings and Evenings
I'm not normally one to do an end-of-year retrospective, but this has been a fairly unusual year, to put it mildly. This one is a little rambly and touches on a number of topics. The war on cubicle body I ended up doing a lot more running than I had planned. Gyms were closed much … Continue reading Looking Back, Looking Ahead