A geospatial career journey
These are some of the things I've been up to lately, while the blog has been quiet: At work, I've continued delving into BigQuery. Our FME jobs are running like clockwork and I've been spending a lot of time writing queries and doing analysis for various stakeholders across the company. The next phase of the … Continue reading Lately…
More often that not in my current role, opportunities to get my hands dirty come from the data side of our operation rather than the engineering side. These days, the data side involves corporate data rather than a lot of geospatial data. If I were to be guided by my own personal inertia, I'd drift … Continue reading FME, Salesforce, and BigQuery
All hail the mighty water cooler - the oft-praised bastion of corporate culture, where the strategies of organizations great and small are made or destroyed in the hushed tones of whispered conversations among those who gather for daily hydration. By now, everyone who can has been working remotely for several weeks. Companies are starting to … Continue reading Your Culture Will Adjust
Work in the new all-remote world has actually been quite busy, and I realize I am very fortunate to be able to say that. But we know what they say about all work and no play. For me, play often involves cracking open an IDE, especially since work for me isn't centered on that anymore. … Continue reading Recent Diversions
I spent the better part of a decade and a half building geospatial applications in support of infrastructure analysis. Not infrastructure in the modern tech sense of containers and cloud providers and orchestration, but infrastructure in the classic sense of roads and rail and telecommunications. If we consider infrastructure through the lens of the ISO/OSI … Continue reading Rural Broadband – An Anecdotal Look
Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography that deals with the study of people and their communities, cultures, economies, and interactions with the environment by studying their relations with and across space and place. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_geography) I was catching up with my friend and former boss, Tony Quartararo, a couple of days ago when our discussion got around … Continue reading Personal Geography
Or Skype, or Google Meet, or GoToMeeting, or whatever. As I bounce around social media, I keep running across a lot of spurious advice on how to project a "professional" impression as you, like everyone else, participates in video calls from home. This seems to be particularly true on LinkedIn. Most of that advice is … Continue reading Tips For Your Best Zoom Experience
The cursor flashes, waiting for a command.Any command.An editor window is open,Empty.The fan does not hum, with nothing to cool.The keyboard simply restsAs dust,Illuminated by the stripes of sunlightmoving across the desk,Settles between its idle keys. It all taunts meWith the truth: There is no map I can make,No chart,No graph,No query,No post nor comment;There … Continue reading Nonessential
Data conflation is a meat-and-potatoes task in most GIS workflows. There are numerous reasons one might need to get data from one data set into another. Perhaps you want to attach a new geometry type to existing attributes or a table. Or maybe you need to pull attributes from one or more data sets into … Continue reading Attribute Transfer in PostGIS Using Spatial SQL
I have addressed the topic of triggered notifications a couple of times on this blog previously. I've taken the opportunity to apply the technique to a current use case - the ability to get notifications whenever the confirmed count of COVID-19 cases changes in my county or surrounding ones. I am basing this workflow on … Continue reading Watching COVID-19 Data for Your County with PostgreSQL and Node