Friday Miscellaneous

A couple of things:

Cool Open Data Site: City of Burnaby

Career/Life Advice: via Lifehacker

March highlight: Off to Reno Nevada for the AAAE 2017 GIS Conference

Kudos: FME Presentation by Tim Albert of the Victoria Airport Authority

Me today, trying to wrap up stuff....

Oh hi there!

Man, it's been awhile.

So... yeah... about blogging. Pretty much dead here. Between the great job I have at the Airport, and the better little family I have at home, this little activity has fallen off the rails.

But if you are reading this, thank you. I've never been a good writer, more of a reader. I think I was hoping I'd used this to mull over my geo-related thoughts, but finding the time, if it ever was a priority, hasn't really happened.

What I have found that The Spatial Community on Slack is a fantastic resource, filled with really good people from all sorts of geo companies, groups, positions. As someone juggling an enterprise GIS system, it's a fantastic resource. Maybe better than Twitter now - especially now that the Orange Douchebag has become President and my Twitter stream is filled with rage & despair on the state of affairs south of the border.

Anywhoooo, if you are into anything GIS and geo-related, as a professional, go join the Slack group. You won't regret it.

That and reading up on the latest GeoHipster interviews.

ESRI UC 2015 Thoughts Part 1

Lots to share, and generally I'll post a bit here about what I took in, if only to make sense of everything I saw and did in San Diego.

In the meantime, you might enjoy this.... ESRI's flickr album of the UC.



And what's a post without a couple of gifs? ;)

How I felt when I got on the plane to San Diego early Sunday.

And when I got back Friday night.

When I read the BC Gov't is joining GitHub...

More info here. (Part of the BCDevExchange Program)

In the spirit of open source projects and development, perhaps a good project might be for a new replacement to the Ministry of Education's BCeSIS program; let's open source the $1.5 million investment the Saanich School District made into the OpenStudent program!

Waiting for ArcMap to display my map

Damn highway dataset of BC was indexed too... <sigh>

Best GIS Career Advice I've Read So Far...

From Thierry Gregorius, via GeoHipster: 

Over the years there has been much discussion and debate about what career a GIS professional should aspire to, or what a GIS career even is. In my opinion you need to have at least one skill that nobody else has. I once called this the “geomatics striptease” — what expertise and value is there exclusively to us geospatial folks? I came to the conclusion that, if I had to strip off my non-exclusive layers, my naked self would be a geodesist and cartographer. No other field does these things, or at least not as well.

There may be a few other exclusive skills in GIS or geomatics, but many so-called geospatial expertise areas also reside in other professions. They’re not unique and this can be a danger area for career development — unless of course you want to become a multi-disciplinary generalist. In which case, sure thing, go ahead and become that ‘architect’ who orchestrates input from different fields. But whatever you do, it needs to be a conscious decision, and it requires focus. If you dilute yourself too much as a professional you’ll become the Swiss army knife that people only use when there’s nothing better at hand.

So to stay relevant, build a unique skill, stay focused, and never grow up. If you do those things, nobody can eat your lunch. 

(bolded emphasis mine)

So true. Find some focus, & make yourself indispensible. Helped my own GIS career over the years.

Also good, along this vein of thinking, Cal Newport's "So Good They Can't Ignore You".

Friday Frustrations.....!

God damn it.

Friday pet peeves.

1. People who don't text back within a resonable amount of time, given the weekend is coming fast.
2. Slow networks at works. Slow editing. Not having a ArcInfo license until January 2015.
3. FME connections to SDE databases that used to work before but now don't. Argh.
4. I haven't played ice hockey in weeks.



As you were.

Friday Mediations

Going to try and write down the best links I can find on a regular basis. Kudos to TM's Recently posts ... And special kudos to this: How to be Polite. Good read.

MAPPING & GIS

Geohipster: Interview with Jonah Atkins

Kottke: The Precision of Lat/long Coordinates. Short answer: the sixth decimal place is worth up to 0.11 m

Via Gordon Price (@pricetags) & VanCityBuzz, a Vancouver link: The beautiful empty homes of Vancouver

When a colleague stops by my cubicle to ask how our internal Web GIS works... (ht: DBA Reactions)


(I'm so new to the job, I barely know the app myself....!)

FUN:

Run, Walter, Run!

WANT:

13 Shoes.
Not all of these, maybe the boots at the end of the list, a couple pairs of brogues, and a set of white Vans for casual Fridays.

Where to Begin...

If you are into SQL server, I highly recommend having a gander at Brent Ozar's DBA training. While most of this is out of my purview, some of the philosophies seem pretty relevant to GIS, expecially if you are maintaining your own system.

As I get entrenched into maintaining YVR's own internal GIS system, which is in it's infancy, this graphic pretty much dictates how I'm going to manage this system.



In between making maps and updating our data, I really have to start from the bottom up (data, users, backups) before diving into anything new like application revamps or Javascript training to figure out those new fangled ESRI API's.

So to my fellow GIS'ers, if you've ever managed your own enterprise system, where do you start? Any tips or tricks I should try? Things you wished you had known back in the day?

Cheers!

(Updated for grammatical reasons...)

Agile Results - A New Workflow?

As someone, who for most part in my career, has been used to taking orders, or had a definite & clear understanding of the work I was assigned to, this new job means that my range of tasks in developing and producing a solid GIS program has become wider.



The last few months, like most new jobs, has been a bevvy of administration duties, budgeting processes, and the standard airport security courses. Such as is it working for an airport, and rightly so.



But overall, the airport is a mini-city and while I could never develop the range of mapping applications or services like a big city and a vast GIS section to service those user requirements, I think I can modernize what's here into something a little more robust for our core users in Engineering and Airport Operations crews. Between meetings for new requests, meeting new people, and figuring out all the new data and software, some days can be overwhelming.  (Side note: Microstation has improved a lot since I took that dreadful course in 2004. <shudder>)



Lots of freedom to explore but a lot of responsibility as well.

I've always had an interest in how to develop a good enterprise GIS program. Kudos to the BCIT GIS program for giving a good foundation in what a GIS can be for an organization.  Now that I'm no longer a small cog in the GIS section, and now the primary one facilitating most aspects of GIS here, it's important to nail down what's important and how to go about giving my coworkers the best data & maps either via ArcMap, or online, or in a printed map.



So JD Meier's post the other day on Agile Results got me thinking. Agile development is all the rage with GIS developers - time to get into that and apply it to my workflow too. Let's see if I can keep up with it in the next month or two and make it a solid habit. With all the changes in my life (personally and professionally), it's a crazy, busy time.



It's great food for thought and something I'll have to practice to be productive. Because my productivity is no longer tied to waiting for a hard-copy map to be printed or icons to be designed for a new map app by the GIS Analyst Team.



...







Gotta channel some Ron Swanson, daily!  And good coffee helps too.

New Job, New Challenges

A few months ago, the local airport posted a position for a GIS Specialist. Given my family circumstances, it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. Career-wise, it's not much of change from my job at the City of Surrey, but definitely a lot broader responsibilities. Which is good, and expansive, as a result of coming to a smaller organization. I'll be doing a lot more GIS system design and maintenance, which, when you are part of a bigger team, and defined by your job description, you may not necessarily get to do very often.  

In the meantime, there's been a lot of tours, security clearances & HR paperwork, and proposal writing. And every now and then, behind-the-scenes looks at the airport inbetween the odd map request!

Python (et al) Cheat Sheets

Awesome. Big Bookmark.

http://overapi.com/python/

Bonus... even more programs and stuff available there too (oooohhh, REGEX!)

Adding CKAN Open Data Geospatial Icons

A little something I've been working on for the City of Surrey Open Data Website. The CKAN github project lacked some geospatial icons, so thanks Adobe Illustrator and the Sam Smith's original design files, I've created a template for AI and hacked a few more designs to add to the CKAN sprite image later on.

Kudos to Sam Smith, Aron Carroll, & Stéphane Guidoin for their help on this.

Thoughts on the last few geospatial design icons?

(Yes, I know there's no shapefile icon. We here at the City have decided not to offer that tidbit on Open Data. Make of it what you will...)

CKAN Icon Template 54x62 px

Geospatial Data Analyst posting at Boundless

(HT: Paul Ramsey)

Lots of career opps @boundlessgeo right now: come work w/ us bringing open source spatial to the world! http://t.co/69G1AJzFVf
— Paul Ramsey (@pwramsey) January 21, 2014

I'm pretty much joined to the hip with the ESRI product line and to my hometown of Vancouver, but if I was a young turk again with no family and aspirations for bigger things, I would have totally applied for this. Nice little sweet spot between being the map production guy and the hard-core geodeveloper.

Seriously kids, if you are in the Open Source Geo World, it looks like a great opportunity. Amazing what changes are going on in the geospatial industry right now.

(and if Homeland is any indication, Maryland, VA seems like a nice suburb of Washington DC. NYC might kill you on the daily expenses, but heck, it's NYC, so there's no shortage of stuff to take in, right?)

New Years Resolutions

Aiming to be a little better with this blog than years previous, or at least document my attempts to get more "professional".

The Lift app helps. Will try to blog once a week and post some semi-permanent GIS activities that I think you'll find interesting. 2014 will be a year of python programming. If that's for you too (and it should be in your toolkit if you call yourself a modern-day cartographer/GIS analyst), get yourself to PyCon 2014 in Montreal! 

Cheers y'all.

PS. 2013 blog of the year, IMHO? Drunken Geographer! 
PPS. In all seriousness, you should be following Planet Geospatial. It's your source to all good geospatial  blogs.
PPPS. Because sometimes you'll just find golden gems like this from Tobin Bradley's blog, Fuzzy Tolerance: What's in My Toolbox 2014. Will have to do one myself, maybe the next one. His, though, will be substantially be better. ;)

When I saw that I made it to OpenGeo's The Top 100 Geospatial Influencers List...

(Via http://ladodgers.tumblr.com/post/59486896740/vivir-mi-vida)

... at #46 though...



(But seriously, thanks for acknowledgement, really enjoying the talk on twitter today!)

Career Illumination

After almost 6 yrs doing map production, I really gotta learn some JavaScript and Python. Again. 

Argh. The banes of GIS work... You are either a mapper or a programmer, and the two are not that interchangeable at the municipal GIS level.... 

That open source web GIS with leaflet is looking interesting. Might have to cut my teeth on that sometime.

After your Sr Management team hears how much ESRI licences will cost

Inspired by this jewel. 

When my colleague fixes a bug in our Silverlight mapping application

Hat tip: Deadspin.

Earthbrowser

Via the planet geospatial feed, I stumbled upon this... Earthbrowser. Pretty cool. I'd like to see if I could add it on the side as a Blogger gadget. Until then, I'll have to add it here.