The year 2017 has been one of the most eventful of my career, but changes and developments were not limited to the professional sphere for me.
Thoughts on the Updated Geospatial Data Act
Over the summer, I wrote a post commenting on a piece of legislation known as the “Geospatial Data Act of 2017.” This legislation, or something similar to it, comes up every few years and has yet to get signed into law. In my post, I raised concerns about language that would have defined the use…
Harvey and Fulcrum Community
There was a time in my consulting career where I was providing GIS software and database support to the US federal critical infrastructure protection community. Part of that work involved ‘event response,’ which most often took the form of natural disasters. I never deployed, but a lot of my co-workers did. Ground truth was always…
FOSS4G 2017 Recap
It’s been almost two weeks since I returned from FOSS4G 2017 in Boston, Massachusetts (USA), and I wanted to take a little time to regroup and get caught up before settling down to write about it. It was a busy week, highlighted for me and the Spatial Networks team by the first-ever Fulcrum Live event….
Thoughts on the Geospatial Data Act of 2017
Before delving into this topic, a big disclaimer is important: I am not a lawyer or a lobbyist or any sort of professional policy expert. The following analysis is based on 25 years experience providing geospatial consulting services to the federal government. You should read the full text of the bill yourself and draw your…
Refreshing a PostGIS Materialized View in FME
I am following up my previous post with an extremely simple example using FME to kick off the refresh of a materialized view (matview) after a data import. I had never used FME prior to coming to Spatial Networks, but now I’m hooked. I’m having a really hard time finding things it can’t do. As…
Working with Materialized Views in PostGIS
It’s been a few months since I’ve posted, owing mainly to getting my feet under me at Spatial Networks. About a month after I started, the company re-merged with Fulcrum, which had previously been spun off as a separate company. As a result, I’ve gotten to know the Fulcrum engineering team and have gotten to…
TUGIS 2017
Yesterday, I attended TUGIS 2017, which was the 30th installment of Maryland’s annual statewide GIS conference. It was a great experience as there is a lot of innovative work going on in Maryland. The one-day format is specifically designed to be a high-value experience. Attendees trade the minimal impact on schedule for the fact that…
Triggered Notifications Using PostGIS, Redux
A while back, I wrote a post about using Python to generate triggered notifications in PostGIS. The approach described in that post is somewhat fraught with peril and I’ve learned a little bit more since then, so I have a different approach, using PostgreSQL NOTIFY and LISTEN, which I’ll describe here.
Engagement
A few years ago, we sold our house and moved into a new one that we had built. The old house happened to be the one in which I had grown up. The process of disconnecting from that house got me back in touch with a lot of tasks that had become muscle memory. For…