A geospatial career journey
This week, I had the opportunity to attend OGC@30, the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The early 1990s were the very beginning of my professional career and they were also a time of geospatial innovation. Many of the pioneers from that time, including OGC founder David … Continue reading Thirty Years of OGC
Getting nothing but static, getting nothing but staticStatic filling my attic from Channel Z - The B-52's I joined LinkedIn first. A friend recommended it to me at the time and I signed up on February 11, 2004. Member number 224,376. I made my first attempt at a blog in 2005 and scuttled it after … Continue reading Reclamation
My last post offered a bit of a survey course on my experience at FOSS4GNA in St. Louis. I have a few aspects of the conference I want to unpack and it may take another post or two to accomplish that. For me, personally, the experience of helping to organize FOSS4GNA, then attending and reconnecting … Continue reading Reflecting on My FOSS4GNA
In the 18+ months since I stepped back into the world of geospatial consulting and services, one of the most striking things I have noticed is the seemingly increased tribalism in the geospatial space. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, given the increased tribalism of society in general, but that’s a different post that won’t get … Continue reading Walls and Bridges
As I mentioned earlier this year, I spend a lot of time working in Python these days. More and more, my work seems to be about performing geospatial tasks with the minimal amount of geospatial dependencies possible. My most recent work has been generating contours from a set of sampled elevation points. I’ve done this … Continue reading Just Enough Geospatial
A couple of weeks ago, I had a need to return GeoJSON from PostGIS. This is something I've done many times, but I usually do the final formatting in the application/API layer with Javascript or Python. Basically, my workflow has been to SELECT, using the built-in ST_AsGeoJSON function to convert the geometry to GeoJSON. I … Continue reading Producing GeoJSON with SQL
Early in my career, I dealt with a requirement to post-process a corpus of existing documents to "geocode" them. This meant identifying the locations referenced in each document, calculating a minimum bounding rectangle (MBR), and writing the MBR, the file path, and some associated ID into a database, so that documents could be surfaced via … Continue reading Simple Geocoding with ChatGPT
A couple of weeks ago, I took part in a live discussion of the Geospatial Innovations group on LinkedIn, along with Linda, Bonny, Tim, and Will. The topic was “Reimagining Maps” and was spurred by a couple of recent posts by Linda and Will - "Modern Mapping" and "Modern Geospatial", respectively. The discussion ostensibly examined … Continue reading Decoupling Maps
I was having a conversation a few weeks ago, discussing, among other things, the value of time - its management, its conservation, how it is the one strategic asset that matters above all others. During that part of the conversation, it occurred to me that if time is the asset, then people and relationships are … Continue reading The One About Friends
I've been integrating pg_webhooks into some project work lately. Conversely, I have not been using n8n much, but a vendor rep used it in a demo of some workflow automation capabilities for a platform one of my customers is using. I had dabbled with it about two years ago but haven't done much with it … Continue reading Using pg_webhooks with n8n – A Simple Example