Archive of posts with tag 'Events'

AWS re:Invent 2019

December 9, 2019 • #

AWS’s re:Invent conference just wrapped last week. Since we’re so deep into AWS technologies, I keep an eye out each year on the trends visible in Amazon’s product launches. They move at breathtaking speed to fill out their offering suite and keep their current momentum as the leader in the cloud space. They’re really nailing the bundling & scale economics that the likes of Microsoft and Oracle were so successful at in years past. When going upmarket, having a product for every problem outweighs the need for having the highest quality in any individual product line. Enterprises often value the ability to buy everythign they need from a single vendor higher than the quality of the products (what Ben Thompson has referred to as the “one throat to choke” phenomenon).

Here are a handful of the announcements I found most interesting, in no particular order:

AWS Outposts

AWS has finally relented to the customer base that’s been reluctant to move to the cloud for the past decade. With the scale they have now they’ve been able to productize a managed service that puts an “AWS in-a-box” type of modular system into a customer’s datacenter, ideally giving the best of all worlds of security, compliance, and exposure to the AWS services and APIs. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of adoption this gets.

SageMaker Studio

SageMaker is their service for creating, training, and deploying ML models. It’s really an umbrella brand name for about a dozen sub-products for various pieces of the ML workflow. Studio intended to be a full “IDE”-style interface for working with everything you’ve built in SM. Clear indication that this is one of their big strategic plays going forward: lowering the barrier to doing ML and having customers new to the space learning with and expanding from the AWS platform from the start.

Rekognition Custom Labels

Rekognition is AWS’s computer vision service, with endpoints for analyzing video and image data for objects, sentiment, content moderation, and search. One of the barriers for image classification tasks has been the ability to tailor the models to recognize other domain-specific content (like “what kind of part is this?” from a list of parts the customer builds). It now lets you upload your own custom labeled image datasets for training custom Rekognition models.

Amazon Builders Library

This isn’t really a service or expansion on one like the others in the list. This is more a knowledge base of content from Amazon engineers on how they internally build and operate software at scale.

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Field Data Collection with Fulcrum, Mapbox, and NetHope →

November 6, 2019 • #

I wrote this wrap-up summary of our hands-on workshop we did at the NetHope Summit in San Juan. It was a great joint session with Mikel from Mapbox and John from NetHope. I’d love to do more of these in the future. Hands-on sessions where we can get outside and see our stuff in action always teach you a lot about how your UX works in practice.

I got to see more of what Kepler can do, too — the open source GIS toolkit built by the Uber team. Pretty slick stuff.

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Learning from Disaster →

August 21, 2019 • #

Through Fulcrum Community, we’ve been working with the team from NetHope to support their needs in responding to disasters around the world. In their work, they help first-responders in humanitarian crises around the world with connectivity and communications when it’s knocked out — cellular coverage, phone communications, and internet access.

This week they’re hosting an event in the hills of central California, mocking up a disaster scenario to experiment in how relief organizations can embrace technology and collaborate with one another.

The DRT event is conducted over a five-day period with trainers from CiscoTacOps, emergency.lu, Ericsson Response, Facebook, and Redline Communications. The first three days of each module focus on theory and practical hands-on training on NH deployed network, P2P, power, VSAT, mobile SatCom and TVWS solutions.

The participants from Google, Facebook, AWS, and Team Rubicon all go through the classroom training and are then deployed to operate in a 48-hour emergency Simulated Exercise (SIMEX). Participants employ NetHope’s mobilization procedures as in a “real-life” emergency to determine how well they can apply the recently learned technical skills in the field while submerged in austere living conditions.

Joe is out there from our team to give the rundown on how Fulcrum can be deployed in disaster environments, as we’ve helped with dozens of times around the world. It’s cool to see this engagement with our tech for such positive work.

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A Growing Geo Community: Takeaways from FOSS4G NA 2019 →

April 23, 2019 • #

I had a great time last week out in San Diego for this year’s FOSS4G-NA. This post I wrote for the company blog runs down general conference takeaways, plus a wavetops overview with best-of sessions I attended. It was a fantastic event, as always. The content was great, but the real win is getting to hang out with friends old and new and stay in touch with what everyone’s working on:

The key to getting the most out of a FOSS4G is the people. I haven’t attended one since 2013, but each one I’ve been to proves this out. The connections I’ve made at past events have been incredibly rewarding and lucrative over the past 8 years. I tell everyone thinking about going that to get the most out of it, you should be an active participant in the community. Sure the sessions are great content, but forming human relationships and expanding your network is the overarching goal. Such a positive, energetic crowd to spend time with!

Next up is the international show in Bucharest, then 2020 in Calgary.

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San Diego April 2019

April 15, 2019 • #

I’m here in San Diego for the week for the FOSS4G North America conference. Today there was a “B2B / Government” focus day, hosted at the Mission Bay Marina Conference Center, a gorgeous spot right on the waterfront.

We’re staying at the Hyatt in Mission Bay. I got in a nice run out to Mission Beach, which is easy to fit in with the weather and views available along the route.

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FOSS4G North America 2019

April 11, 2019 • #

Next week Joe and I will be out in San Diego for FOSS4G-NA 2019. This’ll be my first one since I think 2012. There’s always an excellent turnout and strong base of good folks to catch up with. This year they’ve put together a B2B and Government Theme day to kick it off, which to my knowledge is a new thing for an event typically focused on the eponymous free, open source, and community-driven projects.

I thumbed through the agenda to pick out some topics I’m interested in catching this year:

Open source for utilities and telecom
OpenStreetMap and WikiData
Open source in higher education
PDAL
OpenDroneMap
“Digital twin” technology for infrastructure

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Kicking Off SaaStr

February 5, 2019 • #

Today was day 1 of the 3-day SaaStr Annual, my third one. Each year they up their game in terms of size and session quality. Logistics are much improved at the larger San Jose Convention Center. The team at SaaStr did an excellent job improving on the shortcomings of past years while still expanding in attendance quite a bit.

I did sessions today from Tom Tunguz from Redpoint, Ryan Smith of Qualtrics, and a great back-and-forth discussion with Jeff Lawson (Twilio) and Anil Dash (Glitch).

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San Jose

February 4, 2019 • #

We just touched down in San Jose this afternoon, here for the SaaStr Annual conference. An uneventful flight through LAX, arriving around 1pm local time here in California. One of my favorite things about westbound travel is the ability to get here with enough time to check things out the same day.

As I like to do with a new city, I got out on the road for a run to explore a little. The Guadalupe River runs through downtown San Jose right near where I’m staying. Even though the weather was not playing nice, there was a clear spell before sunset so I decided to get a couple miles in and check things out.

The river was just about to bust over the bank, with the rain rushing northward toward San Francisco Bay. The cold and my lack of preparation for a wet run cut me a little short, but it was nice to get the opportunity right when I got here. If one of the mornings in the next couple days yields nice weather, I’ll be out there for sure.

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Previewing SaaStr Annual 2019 →

January 30, 2019 • #

I’m headed out to San Jose, CA next week for the SaaStr Annual conference. It’ll be my third in a row; definitely one of the events I most look forward to nowadays. It always brings a great combo of interesting content, energy, diverse attendees, and fun side events to enjoy.

I wrote up this preview of sessions I’m looking forward to this time around. They do a great job touching on some of the same things year over year (helpful for tracking industry trends) but also mixing in plenty of new voices each time around.

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Energy & Geography in 2050

November 16, 2018 • #

Another great Geography2050 is in the books. This year’s focus was on energy, and as you might expect much of the panel discussion and subject matter expertise was on renewable energy sources and climate change response issues. It’s a topic I follow loosely, but I learned a lot about the diversity of organizations working on the problem and heard a number of interesting new ideas.

One of the best panel discussions was on energy consumption and economic growth in China — nearly an hour and a half discussion on how China got where it is today, and what the political atmosphere is like around addressing renewable energy issues.

The whole AGS crew, the Council, and all of the sponsors did a phenomenal job bringing it all together (as usual!).

Next year’s focus topic will be on borders — that one should yield some fantastic discussion.

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Teaching OpenStreetMap

October 26, 2018 • #

We’re heading up next month to the American Geographical Society’s Geography2050 again this year, which will be my 4th one, and the 5th annual overall. It’s always a great event — a diverse crowd in attendance and a chance to catch up with a lot of old friends.

The last two years the AGS has hosted and led an OpenStreetMap mapathon in conjunction with the event to promote OSM as a tool in education. It’s organized and led by TeachOSM, and they invite 50+ AP Geography teachers from around the country to learn how to work with OpenStreetMap in their classrooms as a teaching aid. Alongside Steven Johnson and Richard Hinton (who do the real work behind TeachOSM), I’ll be helping out as a volunteer to lend my knowledge of OSM and its editing tools to the group.

I’ve always been a JOSM power user (like CAD for mapping), but I’m sure for this exercise we’ll do things with the built-in editor, iD, and maybe some HOTOSM mapping tasks for aid work. I’ll need to brush up on the latest and greatest with iD. I follow the project on GitHub and have seen tons of activity going on lately.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything in OSM at all, especially in a mapathon group setting. It’ll be a refreshing opportunity to get to do some mapping again and to support such a great cause to promote geography education.

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JekyllConf →

March 31, 2016 • #

JekyllConf is coming up in May, a conference to talk about the latest with Jekyll, the static site generator that lets you publish websites without heavy needs for hosting and databases.

This isn’t a typical conference, either. It’s all online, streaming live via Google Hangouts on Air. Last year there were great presentations from people worldwide on things they’re doing with the framework.

We converted our website some time back to use Jekyll for the entire thing. We started on Wordpress, which at the time made anything that wasn’t a blog post annoying to deal with. Then we moved onto Wordpress just for the blog piece, with a Bootstrap-based custom site for other static pages. For the last 3 years or so we’ve been 100% converted to a static site. Our Jekyll site is now thousands of files that generate the resulting pages, all hosted on GitHub, no web servers where we have to manage Apache or nginx configurations. We even have scripts that generate templates that then generate pages. Needless to say, it’s powerful and changed the way we publish.

I also use it for this site. It’s the only way I enjoy making webpages anymore.

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WhereCampTB

February 22, 2012 • #

My talk from Ignite Spatial at WhereCampTB, talking about the OSM Tampa Bay meetup group. Check out the slides in better detail here.

It was a fun event a couple weeks ago — great participation from folks in all sorts of industries involved in mapping or using GIS tools.

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WhereCampDC

June 23, 2011 • #

We just returned from a fantastic weekend up in DC - first at the Ignite Spatial event on Friday night, then the WhereCampDC unconference on Saturday. Being the first event of it’s kind that I’ve attended (with the “barcamp” unconference session format), I thought I’d write up some thoughts and impressions from an amazing 2-day trip.

Ignite Spatial

This was also my first experience hearing talks in the ignite format—20 slides, 15 seconds each, 5 minutes. A fantastic format to break people out of the habit of simply reading their slides off a screen. Held at Grosvenor Auditorium at National Geographic Society headquarters, the series was well-run, prompted and emcee’d by Nathaniel Kelso, who did a bang-up job pulling together logistics for both days Our own Tony Quartararo gave his first talk in the ignite format: Homophily and the “geoherd”, where he posited that if the theory of homophily (love of being alike) applies to the spread of human attitudes and behaviors, than it also can spread our community’s interest in geography and technology onto other social circles of people who haven’t yet been addicted to using Foursquare, editing OpenStreetMap, or contributing to open source projects. Being aware of our “three degrees of influence” can help us to spread our collective interest in geospatial technology to those that may not even be aware of such things. Vizzuality’s Javier de la Torre presented his work on the OldWeather project, a social and community-driven effort to derive century-old historical weather data by having members transcribe Royal Navy captain’s logbooks—a clever solution to acquiring loads of data about wind, water temperature, sea conditions, and shipboard events from 100 years ago. He even showed off some stunning visualizations of the data. Definitely a crowd favorite. Sophia Parafina declared that “WMS is Dead” (I agree!), Mapbox founder Eric Gundersen showed off making gorgeous maps with their TileMill map design studio, GeoIQ’s Andrew Turner demonstrated the many, many ways he bent geodata to his will to find the perfect DC house.

WhereCamp unconference

The unconference was held at the Washington Post office, which has a nice setup for the format and the attendance that showed up (200 people!). This was my first experience with the user-generated conference format, and I enjoyed it far more out of it than other formal conferences. It starts with the attendees proposing talks and discussions and scheduling them out in separate rooms throughout the day, then everyone breaks up into groups to drill down on whatever topics they find useful. I attend a lot of conferences with high-level discussion about GIS and the mapping community, so in this particular crowd I was more interested in deep diving on some technical discussions of open source stuff we’ve been using a lot of lately.

Unconference board

After meeting most of the guys from Development Seed, I knew I wanted to sit in on Tom MacWright’s talk about Wax, their Javascript toolkit to extend functionality for Modest Maps, which makes it super easy to publish maps on the web. What they’re doing with Wax will be the future of web mapping for a lot of people. Really the only open source alternative to the commercial Google Maps API at this stage is OpenLayers, which can be overly featureful, heavy, and slow for most developers who just want some simple maps on the web. Dane Springmeyer proposed a discussion around “Mapnik Visioning”, wherein we went around the room discussing the future of our favorite renderer of beautiful map tiles. Mapnik is a critical low-level platform component for generating tiles from custom data, a foundational piece of the open source web mapping puzzle, and it was refreshing to see such technical, in-depth discussion for where to go next with the Mapnik project. Takeaway: node.js and node-mapnik bindings are going to be the future of the platform. AJ Ashton spun up a discussion about TileMill, the map tile design studio that Mapbox has constructed to help cartographers make beautiful maps easily with open standards and their own custom data. TileMill has definitely added a huge capability for us to style up and distribute maps of our own data. The stack of tools that TileMill provides allows designers to create great cartography for map data quickly, and to export as a tileset for viewing on the web or mobile. TileMill has firmly planted itself in our arsenal as something we’ll continue to use for a long time, a fantastic tool for designers.

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