technology

Changes In Latitudes…

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Last week was a good week. Given that I was on vacation with my family in Florida, that statement is pretty much a given, but it was still of note. This vacation was our annual week in South Florida at a timeshare we’ve had for years. I have often worked some portion of the week when we’ve gone and I did the same this time. Since I’ve been doing independent consulting, I tend to be hyper-vigilant about time off versus time working. I can’t spend hours on end at the beach without turning into a lobster, so I got in some work during my time back at the room.

I have worked from home for seven years, but have recently gotten more in touch with the value of a periodic change of venue – whether that’s going to a WeWork up in the city or a coffee shop closer to home. It’s a good mental jolt to change my surroundings and have a little background noise. In our post-pandemic world, I think a hybrid work arrangement would be ideal for me. Last week helped solidify that.

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New Directions

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Since the first of the year, I’ve been on my own. After considering a number of really compelling job offers, I decided to start my own company and take a contract position with company doing work that’s meaningful to me (more on that in the future). I’m also picking back up with some GIS work … Read more

Organizational Muscle Memory

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I’ve had plenty of opportunity to tell my “story” lately. After my initial post that my current position is ending, there has been a pleasantly surprising amount of interest and activity. Others have told me that I shouldn’t be surprised, but I feel like I’ve been fairly heads-down the past six years so it was … Read more

Turning the Page

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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 be available for my next role. Until then, I am actively looking in addition to winding things down where I am now.

Regarding my next role, I have taken nothing off the table. I am open to consulting engagements or full-time positions. I am also considering starting my own company, which would be a consulting firm with the intent to grow rather than remaining a one-person outfit. I am writing this post because LinkedIn profiles and one-page CVs rarely paint a complete picture, so this is a companion piece that is intended to fill in the gaps.

I have been in my current position for nearly six years. Given the size of the company, it has been a mix of leadership and hands-on technical work. Since we have always been eyeing growth, I skewed toward leadership, because it is important for a company to avoid single-threading functions through individual people as much as possible.

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Give Me a Standard, Any Standard

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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 find myself missing the influence of OGC on the geospatial technology community.

I’ve spent the last year working on integrating several SaaS systems, including Stripe, Salesforce, NetSuite, and others. I’ve touched upon this in previous posts. All of them implement some form of REST API, but fostering interoperability doesn’t seem to be a primary purpose of those APIs as much as is the enablement of a proprietary partner/strategic-alliance ecosystem. As a result, these APIs, while generally well-documented, are essentially arbitrary. They implement the HTTPS+JSON pattern in the same way that many written languages implement the Roman alphabet. I can sound out the words, but I don’t really have any idea what I’m saying.

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A Week in the Life of a Geotech Omnivore

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Earlier this week, I posted the above tweet. To explain the variety I referred to, here is a partial list, in no particular order, of the tools I’ve worked with in the past week.

  • Node
  • TileMill (Yes, I still use it)
  • ArcMap
  • QGIS
  • Python
  • ArcGIS Server
  • GeoServer
  • C#
  • WMS
  • SOAP (!)
  • Windows Communication Foundation
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • PostGIS
  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • SQL (Spatial and non-spatial for the above platforms)
  • Leaflet
  • GeoJSON
  • X.509 certificates

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The Consultant’s Dilemma

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I’ve worked as a consultant for my entire career, and one of the most rewarding aspects of it is the variety of projects you get exposed to. I’ve gotten to meet and work with great people over the years and have also gotten to work with a lot of emerging technology. In that regard, it’s been a great experience.

One of the most challenging aspects of being a consultant, and probably the biggest thing that makes it not a life for everyone, is what I call the “consultant’s dilemma.” It goes like this: A consultant is often brought into an organization to provide a specific set of expertise that does not exist in the organization at a sufficient level to meet a goal or solve a problem. Despite being brought in to provide a form of leadership, the consultant is never the owner of the solution; nor does the consultant have authority to direct execution. In short, a consultant is brought in to provide direction, but must do so from the back seat.

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Migrations

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With my first post of 2016, I’d like to wish you a happy new year. After a bit of a shutdown for the holidays, I am back at work on some project activities that I had been working in the last quarter of 2015. Specifically, one of our long-standing federal customers has been directed by their customer to migrate their application platform to an open-source stack. The application in question is a mature analysis and visualization application that has been built on a Microsoft (with a little bit of Esri) stack. A migration will be no small effort.

Image by Daniel Rosengren [CC BY 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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Slow Food

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In 1985, I was a junior in high school and I got my first job at a local chain steakhouse. I ended up staying there for a few years and did everything, including management. This particular location happened to be the busiest store in the chain, which had a couple hundred locations at the time. Basically, we just unlocked the doors and people came in. We often had a line and managers from all over the country came to see how we did business.

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Lock-In

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I’ve been a consultant/programmer/integrator/other for over twenty years now. That’s not quite long enough to say I’ve seen it all but long enough to notice a few patterns. Admittedly, I’ve spent the vast majority of that time working in the defense world so the patterns may be heavily skewed to that but I think not.

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