A geospatial career journey
I've recently spent a lot of time doing various forms of business analytics in BigQuery. As discussed in a previous post, I've been using BigQuery as the data integration environment for several business systems. I've found integration at the data level via an ETL/ELT/IPaaS pipeline to be a lot more stable than system-level integrations that … Continue reading Analyzing Location Change Over Time in BigQuery
I've been paying more attention to my morning and evening routines the past few months. This started as a outgrowth of my focus on fitness, but has since expanded. Originally, I set out to block out time during my day to ensure that I had time for fitness activities. This usually shows up as an … Continue reading Mornings and Evenings
I'm not normally one to do an end-of-year retrospective, but this has been a fairly unusual year, to put it mildly. This one is a little rambly and touches on a number of topics. The war on cubicle body I ended up doing a lot more running than I had planned. Gyms were closed much … Continue reading Looking Back, Looking Ahead
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
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
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 am currently reading the book "Fierce Conversations" by Susan Scott. I am on hiatus from teaching my leadership course this year, so I am taking the opportunity to refresh my content and my perspectives. The basis of the book is fairly simple: Our work, our relationships, and our lives succeed or fail one conversation … Continue reading Open – Beyond Technology