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
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
On March 1, 2024, ArcMap will transition into "mature support." This means it will stop getting patches and updates. While ArcMap is not scheduled to be retired until 2026, the lack of patches and updates is the death knell for any modern software. At a minimum, many IT shops will begin to uninstall it simply … Continue reading Pour One Out for ArcMap
FOSS4G North America was an opportunity for me to reconnect with both community and technology. I enjoyed being able to both learn new things and refresh my skills with technologies such as PostGIS. I was reflecting on how, a couple weeks prior to the conference, I introduced the concept of PostgreSQL window functions to a … Continue reading Window Functions and PostGIS
FOSS4G North America (FOSS4GNA) wrapped up yesterday, closing out with another thought-provoking keynote by Paul Ramsey. Paul’s talks on the “economics of open source” have evolved over the years and, while this talk certainly discussed such economics, it was so much more. Paul is one of the best speakers you will see and his talks … Continue reading Initial Thoughts on FOSS4G North America
At the time of my last post, there were a few outstanding issues that I wanted to address in the code of pg_webhooks. I've addressed three of them this week. There wasn't actually a route to unsubscribe from a channel, so I added that shortly after the initial release. Another key shortcoming was that the … Continue reading A Few Updates to pg_webhooks
PostgreSQL's NOTIFY/LISTEN method for subscribing to events from a database is a subject I return to periodically. I've touched on it in one form or another over several years. My latest run at it involves building a Node Express application that will allow external systems to subscribe to webhooks that are fired by NOTIFY statements … Continue reading A Simple Webhook Interface for PostgreSQL NOTIFY
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
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