A geospatial career journey
"Ops" is all the rage these days - DevOps, RevOps, FinOps, PeopleOps. I'm surprised I haven't seen a mention of "GeoOps" yet, given the propensity of our corner of the world to attach the "geo" prefix to what ever the current hotness may be. "Ops" is, of course, short for "operations" and "operations" is a … Continue reading In Praise of Process
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
Since everyone works from home now, I hear a lot of the same complaint about the proliferation of online meetings. A lot of people I know seem to have their calendars overwhelmed by one kind of meeting or another. This situation is invariably described as preventing them from getting work done. Let's be clear about … Continue reading On Meetings
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. … Continue reading Geography, Geospatial, and GIS
The year 2021 ends tomorrow. Like many, I started the year with great hope as vaccines were around the corner. I never expected them to be a miracle cure that would make the pandemic go poof, but I hoped that people would get them in quantities that would put it in check. To say I … Continue reading So Long, 2021
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 … Continue reading Reconsidering the Spreadsheet
Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on Clubhouse, hosted by Todd Barr and Jordan Cullen, and including Will Cadell of SparkGeo. Clubhouse seems to be a really convenient venue for setting up such a forum with low barriers to entry, so that was enjoyable. The topic of the discussion … Continue reading Return on Non-Investment
As I continued my experimentation with BigQuery, I found myself wanting to more easily use it with my regular GIS tool set. BigQuery has a lot of powerful analytic capability, but the SQL console is intimidating for the casual user and the GeoViewer tool is fairly limited. As I began digging deeper in my previous … Continue reading BigQuery and Koop
This post is a continuation of last month's post about analyzing location change with BigQuery. At the end of that post, I was already thinking of ways to extend the analysis and visualization. I decided to take the opportunity to explore Esri's recently-announced ArcGIS Platform APIs. These APIs are the same that have been available … Continue reading Routing with BigQuery and ArcGIS Platform APIs
Following up on my previous post, I decided to attempt the same analysis in PostgreSQL. The analysis doesn't make use of any spatial logic itself (yet), but I consider this a PostGIS post because it is using PostGIS geometries. In the past, I have noticed that BigQuery SQL is very reminiscent of that of PostgreSQL, … Continue reading Analyzing Location Change Over Time in PostGIS