A geospatial career journey
I can't remember the exact time that I met Paul Ramsey in person and had a conversation with him - it was either at the 2011 FOSS4G in Denver or the inaugural FOSS4GNA in DC the following year - but I clearly remember what he said to me. By then, I had been writing this … Continue reading Long-Form Spatial Writing
UPDATE: This post has been edited to provide the new, user-friendly URL. I've missed Planet Geospatial. I've missed it so much that I messaged James the other day and said we should get it going again. He wholeheartedly agreed and then started going on about perfectly valid stuff like not wanting to wrestle with 15-year-old … Continue reading GeoFeeds Is Online
As a consultant, I have to submit my resume a lot. You always want you resume tailored to the project you're trying to land. In the old days, that meant taking the most recent version, tweaking it, and hope that any gaps from the previous version aren't fatal. But these aren't the old days and … Continue reading A Career Narrative – Not a Resume
As a consultant, I have always placed a premium on the maturity of the technologies I recommend and deploy for my customers. While staying current with innovations, especially in the geospatial space, is a critical part of my work, I believe in letting new technologies develop and stabilize before introducing them into customer workflows. This … Continue reading Cloud, Ready
I started the year with a sense of renewal. By that, I mean that I had cataract surgery the first week of the year and I literally have a new vision for the future. This time last year, I was already down with bronchitis - the result of an unnamed respiratory illness that knocked me … Continue reading Onward to 2025
This week, I had the opportunity to attend OGC@30, the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The early 1990s were the very beginning of my professional career and they were also a time of geospatial innovation. Many of the pioneers from that time, including OGC founder David … Continue reading Thirty Years of OGC
I recently had the opportunity to help organize last week’s inaugural DMV GIS Day, a virtual event hosted by New Light Technologies (NLT) that brought together geospatial professionals and enthusiasts from across the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia region. It was an inspiring reminder of the innovation and collaboration that define our field and our region. … Continue reading Reflections on DMV GIS Day 2024
A few months ago, I wrote a post about how to generate GeoJSON feature collections using pure SQL in PostGIS. After attending FOSS4GNA and learning more about GeoParquet and DuckDB, I wanted to modify the approach to use those tools. What is DuckDB? It is an in-process SQL database management system designed for fast analytical … Continue reading Producing GeoJSON from SQL, Part 2 (DuckDB/Geoparquet Edition)
My last post offered a bit of a survey course on my experience at FOSS4GNA in St. Louis. I have a few aspects of the conference I want to unpack and it may take another post or two to accomplish that. For me, personally, the experience of helping to organize FOSS4GNA, then attending and reconnecting … Continue reading Reflecting on My FOSS4GNA
I flew home from St. Louis yesterday, returning from the FOSS4G North America conference. I took a different approach to the conference this year than I did in 2023. Rather than moderate sessions and participate in a lot of on-site logistics, I sat in on more sessions so I got to see a lot more … Continue reading A FOSS4GNA Savasana