TUgis Wrap-Up

Earlier this month, I attended TUgis, Maryland’s annual GIS conference. It was my first time attending since I gave the keynote address in 2017. That was due primarily to the conference being moved to early August – a reasonable adjustment due to the fact that the venue is always Towson University and the new timeframe takes advantage of the fact that students are still away on break. That timeframe also happens to usually coincide with my family’s annual vacation. The other reason for my long absence was the pandemic.

This year, the conference occurred right before our vacation, so I was able to squeeze it in – though I had to leave halfway through the second day to finish travel preparations. For me, the conference was a chance to catch up with a number of people I hadn’t seen in quite a while – all of whom I mentioned over on LinkedIn. I especially enjoyed catching up with a couple of my former Fulcrum co-workers whom I had worked with for my entire tenure there. Those were exceptionally meaningful years for me and I feel like we grew a lot together.

As for the conference itself, I attended the public safety special interest group and a few other sessions. As a recovering programmer, it’s always interesting to see the software solutions people develop – either from scratch or customizing some other software. At TUgis, that other software tends to be some form of Esri application, though there were a few mentions of open-source tools as well.

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The Best Thing I Saw at TUGIS 2013

I spent the day yesterday at Towson University attending the TUGIS 2013 conference. The new one-day format was a firehose that showcased the diversity of geospatial work occurring across the State of Maryland. The keynote by Learon Dalby was well-received and the content of the conference was generally substantive. While the day was a sprint, there was one workshop that really caught my attention more so than I would have thought from its title.

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Off to TUGIS

Tomorrow, I’ll be heading up to the Towson University GIS (TUGIS) conference with 500 or so of my closest Maryland geo-friends. It has been restructured into a one-day event and the program seems to be very content-rich as a result. I am particularly happy to see more open-source content this year. There’s an intro session featuring PostgreSQL, PostGIS, QGIS, and GeoServerpresented by Salisbury State University. Salisbury was once known as a bastion of Manifold so they’ve got a long history of thinking outside the Arc. Additionally, there is a session (by Towson University) discussing the use of GDAL, OGR, and Shapely in the development of a spatial service.

Brian Timoney's favorite state flag

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