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...
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.
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,...
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...
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.
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:
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).
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...
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.
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...
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...
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....
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...
