Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa Jimmy Buffet, “Fruitcakes,” 1994 I hate writing tests. With the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. Tests are good and necessary for quality software. Automating tests is the core of any CI/CD pipeline worthy of the name. I am well-versed in the value of tests and testing. I…
Tag: programming
Data Over Software
One of the first tasks I ever had in my then-new GIS career was doing AML development in ARC/INFO 6.x for a data production project. My code parsed DXF exported from AutoCAD R11 for DOS and then assigned attributes based on things like layer, color, line weight, feature type, and others. It also georeferenced the…
Lately…
These are some of the things I’ve been up to lately, while the blog has been quiet: At work, I’ve continued delving into BigQuery. Our FME jobs are running like clockwork and I’ve been spending a lot of time writing queries and doing analysis for various stakeholders across the company. The next phase of the…
Catching Up with Microsoft
Recently, I’ve gotten back in touch with .Net in the form of .Net Core. I’ve been shaking off some the coding rust and building some tools to help with data handling related to the Foresight data service at Spatial Networks. It’s been fun to get my hands dirty again and also interesting to see how…
Looking Ahead
I started this blog because I love to write. At the time I started it, blogging was what passed for social media, but I wasn’t necessarily looking for a social experience. I just wanted to write. I was at a point in my career where I was fairly cloistered inside the windowless rooms of the…
Other People’s Code
It’s something of a running joke that, you hand existing code to a developer, that developer will stay up all night completely re-writing it. I wish I could say it was completely a joke but, not only have I seen it happen numerous times, I’ve done it. Counter-intuitively, some developers find it easier to use an…
Client Certificates In a Desktop Application
Lately, I’ve been working on a project that involved retrofitting authentication via client certificates, similar to CAC/PIV smart card authentication, into an existing set of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) web services and a desktop (yes, desktop) client application that was designed to interact with them. The first part was pretty easy to figure out; the…
My Path to GIS
TL;DR: This post is long and there is no summary. When you reach a certain stage in your career, you start fielding more and more inquiries from those younger than you about how you got started in your field. In my case, the field is GIS. The short answer, and not a particularly uncommon one,…
Working with Node and the GeoServer REST Configuration API
I’ve been working with a mix of technologies lately that includes Node and GeoServer. I’ve recently begun integrating the two by using Node to manipulate GeoServer’s configuration through the REST API it provides for that purpose. One task I’ve been working on automating is the registration of vector layers stored in PostGIS with GeoServer to…
Data, Apps, and Maps
It’s been a quiet month-and-a-half here on the blog, mostly owing to an abundance of project tasks. I recently started a short-term project to help one of my Federal customers extend data source support for an application they have been developing. This customer is technically a new one but the project team is made up…