A geospatial career journey
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
For a long time now, I have tried to take a holistic approach to my day. I long ago seized upon the idea that time is the primary resource to manage and that all others, including money, are secondary. Show me a person who says "Time is money" and I will show you someone who … Continue reading Geography Matters Less
To say that programming saved my life would be overly dramatic. Given that I started programming at an age where most of us are prone to drama based on the ebbs and flows of hormones, a dramatic reading of my first forays into programming would be forgivable. But, while programming didn't save my life, it … Continue reading A Programming Life
"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
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
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
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
It’s been a few weeks since I hit my latest milestone, but life was fairly full in the immediate aftermath. On the plus side, the extra time was good for reflection. The milestone to which I am referring is that, on October 27, 2019, I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, DC. The race … Continue reading Milestones, Goals, and the Power of No