A geospatial career journey
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
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 … Continue reading QGIS and a Small Passion Project
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 … Continue reading Services, Solutions, and Products
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 … Continue reading Give Me a Standard, Any Standard
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 … Continue reading Simple Isochrone Analysis in QGIS
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 … Continue reading SaaS, IPaaS, and Interoperability