In short:
- MIT license
- TypeScript codebase
- Contributions welcome
Placemark is the map editor software-as-a-service that I built for several years. It’s a website where you can import, create, edit, export, publish, and visualize geospatial data.
The code is on GitHub and already receiving contributions.
You can serve PMTiles directly from a cloud object storage but in some cases, you want to control who accesses data and how often—and you need a server for that. Craig Kochis wrote up two examples of how to serve PMTiles using a NodeJS server application from a co-located file and S3.
I tried to estimate the cost of hosting Protomaps on AWS before; now there’s a handy tool for that. Based on monthly tile requests you can compare the cost of hosting Protomaps on AWS or Cloudflare with the cost of using maps from Google or hosted map-tile providers.
A webinar on cloud-native geospatial technologies and their applications in the pacific region features four speakers:
The two-hour recording is now available online.
collection-transaction is a new STAC extension proposing an API for managing STAC collections and providing a clean REST interface for managing collection metadata:
POST to create,PATCH or PUT to update, andDELETE to delete an item.stac-fastapi’s transaction extension already supports collection management, but its implementation is inconsistent with transactions API for items. collection-transaction will align both APIs and provide a consistent standard for managing STAC metadata.
Brian Timoney contemplates why talented GIS professionals seek employment in other areas, tracing the problem to broad scoped roles and lower pay compared to similar roles in other industries.
Even discounting the vagaries of job titles, the skew in the distribution of GIS Analyst salaries is notable because it implies a stagnant middle grinding away while effectively blocking the ability of new entrants to rapidly ascend the wage scale as you’d find in more “normal” distributions
I have no numbers to back this up, but my gut feeling is that most GIS Analysts work in civil service. Salaries in civil service are tightly regulated; you don’t just negotiate a higher pay unless your department has a role in a higher salary band and you land that job. That might explain why we’re seeing this skew towards lower salaries and the limited upward mobility.
That said, Brian’s point is correct: GIS-specific roles are often too broadly scoped and underpaid.
The recordings from this year’s PostGIS day are available on Youtube; just in time so you can add them to your festive tech playlist.
The very popular SatSummit is back next year on the 16 and 17 May, as always in Washington DC.
SatSummit convenes leaders in the satellite industry and experts in global development for 2 days of presentations and in-depth conversations on solving the world’s most critical development challenges with satellite data.
At this point, the organisers are looking for sponsors; if you have a couple of bucks to spare, consider sponsoring one of the few events that usually assembles a truly diverse set of speakers. The call for session proposals and registration have not yet been announced.
Sad news from Placemark today, the platform is shutting down in January:
Well, I’ve made the decision to wind down my efforts on Placemark - it’s been a lovely journey thanks to great folks using it (like you!) but ultimately wasn’t self-sustaining financially.
Starting today,
- New signups will be disabled
- Existing paid users will have free access until January 19, 2024
- In January 2024 I’ll release the full source code for the application as open source
The writing has been on the wall since Tom MacWright wrote in January:
I’ve envisioned it as a tool that you can use for simple things but can grow into a tool you use professionally or semi-professionally, but maybe that’s not the future: the future is Canva, not Illustrator.
Tom was the creator and only person who worked on Placemark (as far as I know). It’s hard to compete as a one-person company, when products as impressive Felt launch at the same time.
A short programming announcement: In addition to Twitter and Mastodon, I’ve started posting updates to Bluesky.
I also have a couple of Bluesky invites to give away. If you’re interested, shoot me an email at letters@latlong.blog. Yes I prefer email; I’m that old. I’ll send the invites out on a first come, first serve basis. I will be using your email adress for this purpose only, I won’t store your email or sign you up for a newsletter.
I’d like to use the occasion to remind everyone that the feeds are the best way to get notified of new content on the site. No sign-up required, you get full articles delivered to your favourite feed reader, and you get to support the open web.