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 its own work. It is dependent on our sales team to capture work and communicate when the deal has closed so work can begin. As we grew, and as we switched to fully remote during the pandemic, this communication often lagged, resulting in delays in starting work that had previously closed. We chose to tackle this problem with automation.
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Lessons from Maps and Old Code
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 this that they had to understand the problem far better than me and maybe my time would be best spent learning from their code.” The really tough part about this is that it’s not always a fallacy.
My own encounter with this dilemma came early in my career – early enough that the code in question was written in AML. The company I worked for at the time had just transferred me to the offices of a large water utility to take over the development of their cartographic production system from a developer who had recently moved on. I had never met this developer and he was already gone, so I only had his code to work from.
Reflections, Twenty-One Years On
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 wasn’t in the city and I have nothing to add about that day.
Twenty-one years ago today, I was driving back home with my family and, as we crossed the Harry Nice Bridge from Virginia back into Maryland, it was flanked on either side by armed boats from local law enforcement and the National Guard. At that time, I was a contractor supporting an infrastructure protection program for the Department of Defense. There was no clearer illustration of the importance of what we did than those boats on that day.
QGIS and a Small Passion Project
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 photos of the presidential plane, commemorative holiday pictures from the White House, and Christmas ornaments, for example. Occasionally, I’d run across fun things like his old passport with stamps from countries who have not been friendly with the US in decades – hints of a bygone geopolitical era. One time, I found four sets of gold-rimmed Ray-Ban aviator glasses that had been standard issue for a few years – especially for those who spent long days on tarmacs.
Recently, he pulled out a memento I had never seen, pictured at the top of this post. It was box that was given to personnel who accompanied Eisenhower on a trip through Europe, Asia, and Africa in 1959. The box was full of other mementos, including a deck of cards from the Columbine, the propellor-driven predecessor to the Boeing jets that have been flown for several decades now. Also a Zippo lighter still polished to a high sheen. But what fascinated me was the map on the cover. I took a picture of it and came home intent on recreating it with GIS.
Services, Solutions, and Products
Prior to my current role, I spent 25 years working in the federal contracting space. Almost all technology built in that world is one-off and designed for the specific needs of a customer. Often, those needs are complex and meeting them involves creating new technology. “Productizing” a solution is common trope around the Beltway among integrators of all sizes. Most of the time, attempts to do this never get past the whiteboard stage and those that do invariably fail to become anything the wider technology market would recognize as a product.
In my current role, I happen to work for a company that actually succeeded in turning a solution it built to support its original services-based business into a thriving software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. While this represents an anecdotal and statistically-insignificant sample of one, it has helped me understand the differences between successful products and those solutions that never quite get there. I also happen to manage the portfolio of SaaS platforms my company uses for its own operations, so I’ve had a good chance to observe commonalities among many products and contrast them with the solutions in the previous phase of my career.
Give Me a Standard, Any Standard
I’ve spent the last year or so doing very little with geospatial technology, but I find myself missing it tremendously. Of course “in my blood” and “how I’m wired” and similar aphorisms apply to how I’m feeling, but that’s not what really has me missing geospatial. In a shocking (for me) turn of events, I find myself missing the influence of OGC on the geospatial technology community.
I’ve spent the last year working on integrating several SaaS systems, including Stripe, Salesforce, NetSuite, and others. I’ve touched upon this in previous posts. All of them implement some form of REST API, but fostering interoperability doesn’t seem to be a primary purpose of those APIs as much as is the enablement of a proprietary partner/strategic-alliance ecosystem. As a result, these APIs, while generally well-documented, are essentially arbitrary. They implement the HTTPS+JSON pattern in the same way that many written languages implement the Roman alphabet. I can sound out the words, but I don’t really have any idea what I’m saying.
Simple Isochrone Analysis in QGIS
With my MBA program behind me, one of my goals has been to shake the rust off my coding and GIS skills. For this post, I thought I would start simply, just to make sure I remembered how to find my way around QGIS.
We recently purchased a plug-in hybrid. It has a 17-mile range when running fully electric, so I used this as the basis for a quick analysis with QGIS. Of course, any such experimentation isn’t much fun without a few unrealistic assumptions, so here they are:
- The car was parked with an empty tank.
- It was brought up to a full charge overnight.
- Rather than immediately going to a gas station, we’ll go to a charging to top off the battery again.
These assumptions are, of course, ridiculous, but they allow me to have some fun.
I decided to build out drive-distance isochrones representing ten miles and sixteen miles. Ten miles represented the safe range, and sixteen represented the edge of insanity, at which I should use the last mile to find a gas station.
SaaS, IPaaS, and Interoperability
I started this blog back in 2006 during a time when I wasn’t doing much geospatial work at all. I was working on building a human resources system for a federal government customer who was falling under the then-new and now-defunct National Security Personnel System. Because it was new and sufficiently different from the GS system, there were no off-the-shelf products to acquire. So I found myself deep in the development of logic to model workflows for personnel reviews, tracking accomplishments, and other minutiae of managing different types of personnel. There was no room for anything geospatial and I felt it, probably incorrectly, slipping away so I started doing personal projects at home. This blog started out as the means for documenting those diversions, which included my first dabblings with PostGIS among many other things.
I find myself in a similar period now. I’ve been mostly occupied the past few months with migrating to a new billing system. It’s not sexy and it’s certainly not geospatial, but billing is a necessary engine of any business. When people talk about “growing pains” as businesses scale up, billing is one of the biggest.
Geography, Geospatial, and GIS
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. In my daily life, I use the three terms “geography,” “geospatial,” and “GIS,” but I don’t use them interchangeably. I see all three as related in a layered fashions with geography being the bottom base layer and GIS being the top layer. I’ll briefly discuss each from bottom to top.
First is geography. The way I think about it, geography is the science that underpins the entire “geo” technology industry, as well as others. It is the theoretical, mathematical, and scientific construct that defines the boundaries of the sandbox in which we play. Because it’s a science, those boundaries are always changing and expanding, but that’s simply understood. Without the science of geography, the rest isn’t possible.
Reconsidering the Spreadsheet
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 … Read more