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After a year and a half with my current company I have decided it is time to move on. In two weeks I will be working for a differnt company and will no longer be dealing with GeoSpatial Application development. I am eager to start working with my new company and hope it will provide some interesting challenges in the years ahead.
I have found lately I am just not excited about writing code. I find it is not the programming that has me down, but my current work and environment. Since turning in my notice at my company, I have found the old joy of sitting down and programming again. I hate saying this, but the environment I am leaving was seriously taking the fun of the job out of the picture.
Well wish me luck!
Aaron
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Our developers never release
code. Rather, it tends to escape, pillaging the countryside all around.
The Enlightenment Project (paraphrased comment)
Visit Me at GISDevCafe
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In the GIS/Geography blog sphere there has been quite a bit of talk over the past couple of weeks, asking "Where is the GIS Community".[^]. The primary conversation focuses on the lack of community or feel of community by GIS professionals and Neogeographers.
I think this is pertinent to CP as we have formed a community here. I am actually curious what makes this community so different compared to the GIS Community. I would say software development in general has a strong tendency toward creating a sense of community. GIS is very technical and has very serious practitioners. One of the arguments that I make is that within the GIS community t there is little communication between practitioners, consisting mostly of one way communication(Where is the Communication? People are talking but is anybody communicating?[^]).
While I know most cpians are not spatial developers, I would be interested to get your thoughts on why it seems as developers we can form a community, but GIS developers and other practitioners are unable to organize into a healthy communicating community.
What are your thoughts?
What makes a community work?
How important is bidirectional communication?
Aaron
_____________________________________________________________________
Our developers never release
code. Rather, it tends to escape, pillaging the countryside all around.
The Enlightenment Project (paraphrased comment)
Visit Me at GISDevCafe
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This week has been a busy week for me both at work and on my website. I have had a strong idea of topics to post and had written several pieces in my head, but just never made the time to write the posts. So, this week I decided to bang away at the keys and started posting stuff that I have been wanting to write about for a while. Feels good to be actively busy and start to see some activity there.
Otherwise this week in the geoblog sphere there has been discussions on what exactly are neogeographers and how are they affecting cartographic representation of spatial data. This discussion stemmed from an interview with Steve Chilton, Chairman of the Society of Cartographers - Here is a blurb from my site:
In a recent post on Google Earth Design, Rich Treves interviewed Steve Chilton,Chairman of the Society of Cartographers. In this interview Chilton reflects on trends in modern cartography and map production, referring to the new breed of map producers as NeoGeographers. Further Chilton simplifies NeoGeography/NeoCartography to the production of maps over the internet and credits the users as simple and uncaring of traditional cartographic and geographic principles. While I am sure this definitely is the case for some of the internet mapping producers, I feel his description to be an extreme oversimplification of who is producing geographic content published on the internet. So this raises the queston what is NeoGeography and how should it and its producers be defined?
From: NeoGeographers and NeoGeography Oh My!!!
As well, I have posted an article to the August 6th anouncement that NASA would have collections available in Microsoft's photosynth application, currently in developmehnt. You can find out more from here:
Nasa and Photosynth Team Up[^]
Not a whole lot code or development wise, but should have allot more of that in coming weeks. One really nice discovery for me was actually using Google Analytics to get site statistical information regarding my website. I will say the UI on this tool is nothing short of Amazing and it gives so much information. I have actually found my self playing with all the little detailed views and filters for hours, just because it is really cool to get that level of site/visitor information. My favorite feature so far has been the map. I just love looking at visits from other countries and seeing what they are interested in. Can't tell you why I love it so much, I just do.
Aaron 
_____________________________________________________________________
Our developers never release
code. Rather, it tends to escape, pillaging the countryside all around.
The Enlightenment Project (paraphrased comment)
Visit Me at GISDevCafe
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My about me is pretty bland on this site, and I realize this. But recently when I was reviewing the material from my personal website I realized I did have a sense of humor when writing an about me entry:
About Aaron W. VanWieren : Site Administrator
I am currently working as a GIS Software Engineer in downtown Atlanta. I have been working as a professional programmer for over 10 years determining c# as my language of choice. Besides programming I have been employed as an Archaeologist, Journalist, Salesman and Forensic Anthropologist to name a few of the jobs. I am passionate about programming, but I also enjoy backpacking and traveling as well as long walks on the beach. I also greatly enjoy immersing myself in the trivia and minutia of all things relating to “Geek” matters.
From: GISDevCafe[^]
_____________________________________________________________________
Our developers never release
code. Rather, it tends to escape, pillaging the countryside all around.
The Enlightenment Project (paraphrased comment)
Visit Me at GISDevCafe
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I have had my site up and running for a little bit, but have not really been able to find the time to contribute content. Well, after seeing all the GIS blogs focusing on this gadget or gizmo or something the other, I have decided to start a series on GIS and the digital domain. The firs piece is more of an introduction and some venting, but I think this may start some interesting discussions on the role and state of GIS in the digital web and not focus solely on new technology.
My over all goal is to focus on an important issue to me... quality. As a developer I have seen so many quality issues with the rise of the internet and digital information. It is these same issues that I see digital GIS following in.
If your interested check it out at GISDevCafe[^].
Hopefully I will find time to talk about development as well, as I would like to write more about some of the things I have been involved in lately, so look for some articles as well on ramblings regarding performance, probably something about my favorite topic, SMO and what ever else coding things come to mind.
I don't intend for this to be just a jumping board for my blog, so I am trying to add some meaningful content here as well, as I feel this community deserves something more than visit this site <site>.
My 2C worth...
_____________________________________________________________________
Our developers never release
code. Rather, it tends to escape, pillaging the countryside all around.
The Enlightenment Project (paraphrased comment)
Visit Me at GISDevCafe
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I have paid for a web account for a number of months, which has lied dormant for quite a few. Recently I decided it was time to take action and actually place a CRM on the site and get blogging. Well, not just blogging, but talking about all the cool development stuff that I think some people would be interested in, if not for my wifes sake of me having an outlet that is not her ear.
Well, I will say there are so many different blogging packages/CRMs out there it is truly over whelming. I originally had chosen xoops, as what programmer would not be lured by the promise of a truly object oriented crm? I found this was not terrible, but I had to spend allot of time getting the thing up and running. I was eager to play with the "Article" module and this looked extremely promising for content management. Well, I played and tinkered for a while, but eventually got a little frustrated, I am a developer, how hard can this truly be?
So, I am removing it as I type, to try the favorite of all favorites... Wordpress. I just want to blog, store some links, maybe articles... or even better, link my cp articles with it. I know, CSS and HTML work wonders. But I want to take advantage of the wonderful features provided by CMS's.
I guess I will continue to post my woes and tribulations. If you want to see the progress visit my homepage listed in my sig... that is if there is anything there hosting a site...
AAron
_____________________________________________________________________
Our developers never release
code. Rather, it tends to escape, pillaging the countryside all around.
The Enlightenment Project (paraphrased comment)
Visit Me at GISDevCafe
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Ok, not really! Just working over the weekend as I have a demo next week. I get a kick out of finding the simplest little things in my code. I know, this is common practice for most people, but it is so easy to get going and as your working through your code and problem, you all of a sudden realize that you can easily do what you want with less code. Here is an example:
You need to test for four conditions and your solution is one of the four but not any more than one. Well, at first you want to charge forward with a branched if statement, but you realize an if and an else would work just fine as long as you place the statements in a particular order.
I love when I discover these little nuances. They make me very, very happy.
The other thing I wanted to venture was on some ADO stuff. I recently had to merge two different datasources into one database. They contained the same fields except each contained a uniquely named value column. The ending database contained the similar columns as well as each unique value column. This stumped me for a while,but, I realized that I could create a new column in my master datatable for each of the unique value fields. Then all I had to do was import my datarow[] collections into the table, allowing ADO to match the columns.
Hope that made some sense. Maybe I'll explain it better in future writings as the reason for joining these sources lies in my need to work with overlapping segments of spatial data.
AAron
Aaron
_____________________________________________________________________
Our developers never release
code. Rather, it tends to escape, pillaging the countryside all around.
The Enlightenment Project (paraphrased comment)
Visit Me at GISDevCafe
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Don't know who all reads these, but figured I would put something here and maybe ramble a bit. I do have a blog site that I will probably cross post with, but till I get it going maybe I'll ramble here for a while.
If any one reads this, do people actually read these?
_____________________________________________________________________
Our developers never release
code. Rather, it tends to escape, pillaging the countryside all around.
The Enlightenment Project (paraphrased comment)
Visit Me at GISDevCafe
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That post in the lounge was just a ploy to get people to read your blog wasn't it? 
Brad
Australian
- Christian Graus on "Best books for VBscript"
A big thick one, so you can whack yourself on the head with it.
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Actually just trying to get the most out of my community involvement as I have found that I truly enjoy this site. There are so many little nuances and pluses we get with our memberships, might as well try them all out and see what happens.
Thanks, I just discovered this feature of this site and I am truly interested in how and what people use/read on this web site.
Bradml wrote: That post in the lounge was just a ploy to get people to read your blog wasn't it?
Not a bad idea though, even though that was not the intention.
Aaron
_____________________________________________________________________
Our developers never release
code. Rather, it tends to escape, pillaging the countryside all around.
The Enlightenment Project (paraphrased comment)
Visit Me at GISDevCafe
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