It wasn’t that long ago that I was “always on” in terms of work. There is a certain ethos in the DC area that rewards that outlook and I was fairly good at it. This was compounded by the fact that I was a partner in my company and the buck always stops with the…
Tag: Career
Evolution and Leadership
My first management position was at a restaurant. It was a chain steakhouse in a one-horse town in Maryland. A few months into that role, I was the sole manager on duty for a weekend night shift that was going poorly. Feeling my frustration mounting, I did the most mature and leaderly thing my 19-year-old…
Miles to Go
This blog started as my lifeline. Fifteen years ago, I was working on a project that wasn’t particularly compelling in an environment that wasn’t conducive to collaboration. I wasn’t doing geospatial work and I was worried that it would slip away. This blog was the mechanism that motivated side projects that kept me in touch…
2017 Through the Rearview Mirror
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.
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…
Making a Change
Most of my January has been a process that culminated in today’s announcement that I will be moving on from Zekiah and joining the team at Spatial Networks, where I will be taking on the role of Vice President of Engineering and Technology. https://twitter.com/tonyquartararo/status/823870924478906368 I’ve been at Zekiah for fifteen years and have had the…
Directions
The 10-year anniversary of this blog is rapidly approaching and it is not lost on me that it has been laying rather fallow of late. I know others with long-running geospatial blogs have experienced similar situations at around the decade mark, and that only seems natural. If you are living your life well, the motivations…
A Week in the Life of a Geotech Omnivore
Consulting is enjoyable due to the variety, but it would be fun to help build a platform. — Bill Dollins (@billdollins) May 2, 2016 Earlier this week, I posted the above tweet. To explain the variety I referred to, here is a partial list, in no particular order, of the tools I’ve worked with in the…
My Path to GIS
TL;DR: This post is long and there is no summary. When you reach a certain stage in your career, you start fielding more and more inquiries from those younger than you about how you got started in your field. In my case, the field is GIS. The short answer, and not a particularly uncommon one,…
Perspectives
Today marks the first day of classes for the spring semester at Salisbury (Maryland) University. This is significant for me because it also marks my first day as an instructor in the Masters of GIS Management program, teaching an online course called “Leadership in GIS Organizations.” This is my first foray back into academia in…