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.

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".

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!

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?)

Prepping for a job interview this week...

.... and trying to plan my wife's birthday plans for the weekend too....



(HT Mashable)

#panic #nopanic

UPDATE (Jan 28): Well, everything pretty much went like this:


Argh.

Nothing to do except....

A late GIS Day entry...

Here's to GIS Day. It's been a few months since my last post but a lot has happened lately. A month long vacation in July meant a maddening amount of frenzied mapping of ECD trends to do in August & Sept. So much so that I had banked a copious amount of flex time (like 2 weeks).

Nevermind the conference in Ottawa - it was great to hear how CDN GIS professionals are starting to merge health data with spatial analysis tools. Some were basic - from "I mapped SES data according to our local boundaries" to developed spatial multi-variate models of traffic accidents in the Island of Montreal. Professionally, it was great to meet other GIS professionals that I had only e-mailed or heard about through local Health Networks. I even managed to check out Ottawa and scowl at the cheap real estate prices (compared to Vancouver anyway).

But after it was all said and done, I've moved on from working at the Human Early Learning Partnership & UBC. Making maps and cartographically styled posters was great but I felt I needed to get back to municipal GIS and flex my old programming skills, especially in ArcGIS. So I'm now at the City of Surrey in the Engineering GIS Section. (Here's the job description.)

My first 3 weeks have been busy - various sections within Engineering rely on the Section for a lot of maps, mostly for Corporate Reports in their reports. Other times require different custom maps so I've gotten used to using templates again in ArcMap. Due to the nature of the work, there isn't a lot of need to have stylized maps created via the "Export-to-AI" route as I did before at HELP. ArcGIS (9.1, phew!) fits the bill for these quick and simple maps. I doubt I'll have to make a cartogram anytime soon.

Unlike the rapid upkeep of the computer systems at UBC, the corporate IT environment is still running on Windows 2000. And Internet Explorer. Ugh. I soooooo miss my Firefox browser at work.

Thankfully, they are heading to Vista in a few months. Skipping XP entirely. It's going to be a wild ride for the oldtimers in the City. ;)

(Maybe if gets to be too much, we can spend some time devoted to planned next year's Halloween festivities....)