A geospatial career journey
At the time of my last post, there were a few outstanding issues that I wanted to address in the code of pg_webhooks. I've addressed three of them this week. There wasn't actually a route to unsubscribe from a channel, so I added that shortly after the initial release. Another key shortcoming was that the … Continue reading A Few Updates to pg_webhooks
PostgreSQL's NOTIFY/LISTEN method for subscribing to events from a database is a subject I return to periodically. I've touched on it in one form or another over several years. My latest run at it involves building a Node Express application that will allow external systems to subscribe to webhooks that are fired by NOTIFY statements … Continue reading A Simple Webhook Interface for PostgreSQL NOTIFY
It's been a few months since my last post, which is not necessarily what I intended, but I took some time off at the beginning of the year before jumping into new ventures. Since then, I've been quite engaged coming up to speed with a new team and getting going on some data architecture challenges. … Continue reading Visiting MAUI
Since the first of the year, I've been on my own. After considering a number of really compelling job offers, I decided to start my own company and take a contract position with company doing work that's meaningful to me (more on that in the future). I'm also picking back up with some GIS work … Continue reading New Directions
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
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
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