A geospatial career journey
Once again, FOSS4G North America is bringing together the people shaping the future of open-source geospatial technology. This year, it takes place November 3–5 at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia, just a few miles from the centers of federal decision-making where open data, open tools, and open collaboration appear to be increasingly at risk. … Continue reading You Should Attend FOSS4G North America
I mentioned in my previous post that, at a previous career stop, I built open-source support into our IT lifecycle. Specifically, we used QGIS. The primary reason we made that choice is that we were a Mac shop. It's true we could have run ArcGIS Pro inside Parallels, but I didn't see the need to … Continue reading Supporting Open Source: A Case Study
You are already using open-source. I've said that time and again to various audiences. The most committed Microsoft and Esri users will immediately balk, but it's easy to knock the objections down. Azure? Linux abounds. Esri? GDAL under the hood. And what does the "Py" in ArcPy stand for? Oh yeah, Python, the open-source programming … Continue reading Unless…
Before it was HIFLD, it was briefly FGDWG. Before that, it was a nameless thing in its infancy. In those early days, it bounced around between conference rooms in Norfolk, Dahlgren, and Chantilly. I was fortunate enough to be in the rooms where it was born and took shape. I was a contractor supporting an … Continue reading HIFLD Open Is Dead*, Long Live HIFLD
The time since I've last posted has been quite busy. I've completely recovered from my previous eye issues and have been able to start traveling again. In fact, I'm writing this post from a hotel room. In addition to my consulting work at Cercana, I took on a role as the CTO of Photometrics AI, … Continue reading Geospatial, AI/ML, and Infrastructure
It's amazing what you can find when you plug in an old external hard drive. I recently rearranged my desk and realized that one of the external drives on top of my desktop Linux machine had apparently been unplugged for a while. I plugged it in to see what it held, and there were a … Continue reading A Geospatial Time Capsule
I'm happy to once again be participating in a DMV GIS Day event. GIS Day is still months away, but Cercana Systems is partnering again with New Light Technologies on a "Midpoint Meetup." Like the inaugural event, it is a free virtual event. The midyear event will be about two hours long and serves as … Continue reading DMV GIS Midpoint Meetup 2025
For the past two years, have been working with a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) provider supporting various data architecture and geospatial activities. This is a classic infrastructure business that cycles through phases of design, construction, and maintenance as the built environment changes. This leads to a lot classic GIS editing over time - which can mean the … Continue reading GeoParquet Backup and Restore
I recently had a project requirement to export the contents of a delta table in Databricks to several formats, including shapefile and file geodatabase, with the output being placed in object storage mounted to DBFS. I set up the logic in a notebook, with the intent to use geopandas, which provides an easy wrapper around … Continue reading Exporting Data with GeoPandas in Databricks
I can't remember the exact time that I met Paul Ramsey in person and had a conversation with him - it was either at the 2011 FOSS4G in Denver or the inaugural FOSS4GNA in DC the following year - but I clearly remember what he said to me. By then, I had been writing this … Continue reading Long-Form Spatial Writing