A geospatial career journey
It is rare that I use my blog to explicitly blow my own horn. I prefer to write about technology, leadership, and the good works of others, but I find myself in different circumstances now. I learned this week that my current position will be eliminated as of 31 December, 2022. After that, I will … Continue reading Turning the Page
Taking over someone else's code is hard. There is probably no better look at how a person thinks than looking at their code. It can be tempting to trash their code and start from scratch. This temptation often runs into conflict with a sunk-cost fallacy that says "The previous person spent so much time on … Continue reading Lessons from Maps and Old Code
Prior to my current role, I spent 25 years working in the federal contracting space. Almost all technology built in that world is one-off and designed for the specific needs of a customer. Often, those needs are complex and meeting them involves creating new technology. "Productizing" a solution is common trope around the Beltway among … Continue reading Services, Solutions, and Products
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
With my MBA program behind me, one of my goals has been to shake the rust off my coding and GIS skills. For this post, I thought I would start simply, just to make sure I remembered how to find my way around QGIS. We recently purchased a plug-in hybrid. It has a 17-mile range … Continue reading Simple Isochrone Analysis in QGIS
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
This post is a continuation of last month's post about analyzing location change with BigQuery. At the end of that post, I was already thinking of ways to extend the analysis and visualization. I decided to take the opportunity to explore Esri's recently-announced ArcGIS Platform APIs. These APIs are the same that have been available … Continue reading Routing with BigQuery and ArcGIS Platform APIs